by Dan Abnett
It worked, and I was soothed. I sat for a while longer in silence, then took a sip of the very good chocolate that Master Lupan’s servitors had brought. I toyed with the silver pin that I had used to fix my hat, running the tip of my finger along the slight kink in it.
A servitor appeared, with a whirr like a carriage clock’s action, and made a bow. They did not speak, the servitors at Blackwards. It beckoned me. I took up my hat, my gloves and my mantle and went after it. A long, dark hall, lined with the mounted and stuffed heads of all manner of horned ungulates, presently brought me to a fine, circular chamber lined with green velvet, where Lupan was waiting.
In the centre of the room was a round table covered by a clean white cloth. On the cloth sat the book, open, on a wooden rest. Two servitors, fitted with glass hands, waited to turn the pages for me. On a sideboard, other books were waiting in special archive boxes.
‘I took the trouble of selecting a few other volumes, mamzel,’ said Lupan. ‘Others that I thought you might enjoy if this one appealed to you. They are of similar age, or greater.’
I leaned in to look at the history.
‘Here you may see,’ Lupan said, as the servitors slowly turned the pages, ‘accounts of the great campaign.’
‘The publication date intrigues me, sir,’ I said. ‘712.M39 it says, quite clearly. How could this book have been published before the war it records occurred?’
‘Why, mamzel, it was not.’
‘But I was–’ I stopped myself. I had nearly misspoken and said raised to understand, which would have been an error, and would have betrayed my local connections. ‘I was given to understand that the Orphaeonic War took place but a few hundred years ago. Three hundred, I think.’
Lupan then said the most curious thing. He said, ‘History tends to repeat itself, lady. There have been eudaemonic wars in this part of the Subsector Angelus on and off for five thousand years. Perhaps more. They become interchangeable. They blur in the public record until they are all “the war”.’
‘But surely–’
He smiled patiently.
‘The Blackwards have been here for a long, long time, mamzel. The family knows these things. Sancour has lived through many wars. It is always recovering in the aftermath of a war. And all wars become the same war.’
‘But the Saint? Saint Orphaeus, who led us to victory–’
‘All saints become the same too,’ he said. ‘Eudaemonia, my lady. The wars of good daemons. We fight such wars all the time. We build angels to face down the dark. One day, they will not just beat the dark back, but they will conquer it entirely. Angels, mamzel. This is the Angelus Subsector after all.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘Nor should you. No one should, except the most exalted and illuminated. A new Orphaeus comes along every few generations, blessed by visions and perceptions beyond mortal men. He raises armies from Sancour and its neighbour worlds to fight his new war, though in truth it is just a continuation of the same war. No one questions his authority. A mere word from Orphaeus silences any objection from planetary governor or subsector lord. Such is the power of an Orphaeus to charm souls and change men’s minds with words alone. And why would anyone oppose his will, for his war is a just cause. It is a holy war, a struggle to reclaim and purify the soul of mankind. A perpetual war. A war that must always be fought at the sacred heart of mankind.’
He looked at me. He must have seen the perturbed look upon my face. His manner changed abruptly. He seemed embarrassed.
‘Mamzel, forgive me,’ he said. ‘I have run on. I have spoken out of turn. I– I meant no offence.’
What offence did he believe he had given me? I was showing only bafflement. What was he reading in my face? What was he expecting to see there?
‘I merely intended to reassure you,’ he said.
‘To reassure me?’
‘That you have allies. At this time.’
‘Allies, Master Lupan?’
He floundered.
‘That is to say, I merely wished to make my comprehension plain to you. I wanted to show that I understood. I placed the book in the window this morning after, I mean to say, last night’s occurrences. I thought, perhaps rashly, it would give you an opening if one were required.’
‘An opening, Master Lupan?’
‘To– that is to say, to broach the subject. Blackwards would never interfere with the programme. We have always been supporters of the King. But if things have changed, if circumstances have altered, and more active assistance is required… perhaps a hiding place, or escort to a safer world…’
‘Master Lupan, I have no idea what you are referring to,’ I said.
He looked at me. It was a pained, uncomfortable look, like a suitor who has finally plucked up the courage to make his overture to a lady, only to be smartly rebuffed. He was embarrassed, but his pride was hurt.
‘Of course,’ he said, bowing. ‘Of course not. Of course you don’t. It was most improper of me to even mention the matter. I thought– that is to say… Never mind. Forgive me for being inappropriate. I assure you that Blackwards prides itself on its discretion, and I fear I have rather betrayed the emporium’s codes of conduct. I have been too frank–’
He broke off. A bell was ringing from somewhere deep in the emporium. A hand bell, ringing for attention. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I must briefly attend to that. I will return directly. Please, continue to study the book at your leisure. The servitors will bring you fresh chocolate, or some solian tea. I promise you I will be back directly.’
He hurried out. The servitors straightened up and looked at me.
‘Tea,’ I said, and they strode away.
I was alone. Lupan’s behaviour had been most peculiar, and he had mentioned things I had no knowledge of, but I recognised the form of his conversation. It had been a test. A clumsy, and ill-considered test, but a test all the same. He had spoken of things, perhaps using coded terms, that he expected me to know about and recognise. It was an invitation for me to respond to him in kind, to establish a mutual understanding of secret matters. He had not got the reception he wanted. Perhaps his masters, the mysterious and unseen members of the Blackwards family, had been clandestinely watching us, and the bell had summoned him to be rebuked.
What did he think I was? There was one phrase he had used that especially troubled me. After last night’s occurrences.
I had to get out. As soon as he returned, I would make my excuses and leave, craving his understanding for a prior appointment Laurael Raeside could not avoid.
While I waited for him to reappear, I walked around the table and looked at the books on the sideboard, the other volumes he thought might appeal to me.
To me. That’s exactly what he had said. He’d taken the liberty of selecting other books that might appeal to me, not to the tastes of my employer.
I turned each one over in its archive case. A Life of Orphaeus. A History of the Governorship of Sancour, and the Rule of Man in the Angelus Subsector. A drama called The King in Yellow. A treatise on the use of masks, and another on the meaning of identity…
There were many of them, mostly obscure. One was a very small volume, bound in blue, with no exterior marks. I opened its case and took it out. It was a notebook, with yellowing pages, handwritten. It would not, I feel, have looked out of place among the Secretary’s notebooks. It was handwritten in brown ink, in a tight and perfect hand. I could not read it, because the script was in some kind of cipher, or else a language I did not know. But on the inside front cover was a number – 119 – and the following words, written in Enmabic:
Commonplace writings of Lilean Chase; of her knowing (that is, of her Cognitae)
I blinked. The word was clear.
‘He’s coming back,’ a man’s voice said from the shadows. ‘You should be gone from here, or else he will seize you.’
I turned, startled. A man stepped from the shadows of the doorway. He was pale-skinned, but darkly bearded.
His hair was long, tangled and black, and fell about his collar. His clothes were dark too. He looked at me with grey eyes that were neither friendly nor unfriendly, but simply were.
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
‘He were trying to take you delicate,’ the stranger said, nodding his head very slightly in the direction of Lupan’s exit. ‘But he misjudged it. Nevertheless, they mean to have you. You are merchandise. So, if I was you, I’d go before he come back and is less delicate.’
‘Who are you?’ I repeated.
‘Just now,’ he said, ‘I’m the only friend you’ve got.’
The second section of the story, which is called
A DESIRED COMMODITY
CHAPTER 17
Of Renner Lightburn
I fixed him with an unfriendly stare. I did not like the look of him. He appeared lowborn, which is not a failing of itself, for I know I am lowborn, but he seemed tempered with that uncouth and uncivil rawness that one only finds in the roughest of street dwellers.
‘What is your name?’ I asked.
‘I ain’t have no name,’ he replied.
‘Nonsense,’ I replied. ‘Everyone has a name.’
‘I had a name once,’ he said. ‘But not no more. For I am Curst.’
The Curst usually wore their markings plainly, on their cheeks or throats, but I had seen none. Except, now I looked, perhaps there were some, at the line of his cuff, where the pale skin of his wrist showed against the black of his coat jacket: a hint of black lines, a wiry tangle that I had taken to be the hairs on his arm, but which could well be the skin-ink of his station.
And it was a low station. Few in Queen Mab, or elsewhere, are as lowly as the Curst. Perhaps the warblind, for they are the trash of society, though the warblind at least retain some feral pride in their original martial purpose.
‘So, you are Curst,’ I said. ‘So why are you come here? Why are you present in this fine emporium where you have no business being? And why do you make an approach to me, a mamzel of society who–’
‘I am here because I am sent,’ he replied, clearly not bothered to hear me finish. His grey eyes looked me up and down. He was tall, and his straggly black beard occupied the point of his chin and joined with a moustache. His tangled hair was centre-parted. His skin looked as if it had not seen sunlight in a long while, though he did not seem especially filthy. I have heard of, and seen, Curst burdeners who neglect themselves in the most pitiable ways, who renounce washing and other general hygiene in order to hasten the pace of their burden. The neglect is a form of shriving, a chastisement.
‘I will have none of this,’ I said. ‘I am busy here and–’
‘And I will have none of your yap,’ he said. ‘I was sent here to fetch you, and bring you to a particular place. For safety. It’s become part of my burden, so I can’t deny it. I was told I’d find you here, and here you are. I am just in time, I think, because listening to what passed here before, I can tell you that fellow means you trouble. He wants you for what you are. Them Blackwards, they want you. Now come along with me.’
‘Who sent you?’ I asked.
‘She said that if I called her Eusebe, you would know who I meant.’
I started. Could Mam Mordaunt really have sent this Curst man to fetch me?
I turned, hearing someone approach. When I looked back, the Curst had gone. He had vanished, I presumed, back into the doorway shadows, with startling effect.
Four of the emporium’s servitors entered through the opposite doorway, from the direction in which Lupan had disappeared. Lupan was not with them. They were escorting a person I had not seen before.
He was an ample man, not fat, but showing the tight-skinned look of an individual who wants for nothing and dines well every night. He wore a blue suit with a raised golden collar, and his head, shaved of all hair, and oiled, was held up so that, though he was no taller than me, he affected to look down his nose at me nonetheless.
‘Mamzel Raeside,’ he said. ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I am Balthus Blackwards.’
He extended his hand. I took it, and made a curtsey. I noted the device marked on the gold pinky ring he wore. I also noted the tiny bump on the band of the ring on his index finger. A power-cell, or a venom reservoir. The index finger ring, with its heavy memento mori death’s-head motif, was a digital weapon.
‘I was just speaking to your fellow, Lupan,’ I said.
‘I have withdrawn Lupan for the day,’ Balthus Blackwards replied. ‘He is a good man, but only a junior. I fear we may have offended you by not conducting our business with you through a more senior representative of the house.’
‘I was not at all offended, sir,’ I replied. ‘He was most attentive and informative.’
‘You are too kind,’ he said, ‘but I think Blackwards rather underestimated the importance of the party you represent. I venture it is only fitting that a member of the Blackwards family attend you in person.’
‘I am honoured,’ I said.
‘Allow me to conduct you through to the private reading room,’ he offered. ‘The surroundings are more comfortable, and we can have some really rare volumes brought up from the environment store.’
Though I had not spoken to him for long enough to properly sample his inflection and get a true base line, I could read the tension in his voice. There was something preparatory about it. That was not the real giveaway, however. The real giveaway was the manner in which he and the servitors were placed.
It was a subtle thing, but it was plain to me. Blackwards was a little too close. After taking my hand, he should have gone back a step to a more respectful distance for conversation, but he had stayed close. The servitors appeared to be flanking him, but a high-function servitor like these places itself very precisely, according to heuristic encodements and the owner’s operating preferences. For example, when escorting, always a metre from the left or right of the owner’s elbows, and always a pace behind, and always parallel to the companion servitor on the other side. When there are four, formation is maintained, a synchronicity of movement. These devices are expensive, and it simply looks more impressive if they move in a perfectly harmonious manner with their owner. The servitors had done so before, during my visit the previous day, and earlier, with Lupan, they had coordinated all their movements around us perfectly and symmetrically.
These four were not doing so. The two to Blackwards’s right hand were both a step too far back, suggesting they were ready to block the door he had entered by. The two to his left were entirely out of line, almost flanking me rather than him. The lack of symmetry was perhaps explained by the circular nature of the green velvet room: Blackwards’s position relative to the curve of the wall meant they could not stand in exactly equivalent places to the pair on the right.
To me, however, trained by Mentor Saur to watch for – and sometimes conduct – deployments and overwhelms, they were hemming me in, blocking my direct line to the other doorway and almost encroaching behind me.
This I read and noted in a second, just time enough for Blackwards to extend his arm to show me the way, to tilt his head, to say, ‘Mamzel?’
There was a tiny whirr, like the mechanism of a long-case clock preparing to strike the hour. The servitor that had edged most fully behind me moved. Blackwards was the distraction. I could not entirely turn in time, but I snapped around, and brought the object I was holding up as a shield.
It was the little blue book, the commonplace book of Lilean Chase. I got it as high as my throat, like a fan. The servitor was stabbing in with the needle of a syringe built into its middle finger. The porcelain sleeve of the finger had drawn back to expose the needle fitting.
The book barely blocked it. The needle wedged through the cover and the thickness of the pages, and the tip came out through the other side. I saw a tiny bead of fluid wink at the needle’s tip.
But for the book, it would have struck my neck, and that fluid, whatever it was, would have been injected into my bl
oodstream.
Poison? Paralysing toxin? Tranquiliser? Truth serum? It didn’t matter. Someone had just tried to stick a needle in my jugular.
I wrenched the book aside, and the motion sheared the digit clean off, leaving the needle embedded through the volume. The servitor made to grab me, so I elbowed it in the face, cracking its mask. It lurched back a step.
The others rushed me.
I ducked the reaching hands of one, and tried to kick out to disable another, but Laurael Raeside’s gown impeded me. Her clothes were not designed for close combat. I almost stumbled, constrained by the width of the skirt. A servitor grabbed me by the shoulder.
‘Restrain her!’ Blackwards cried.
‘I recommend no such thing,’ said a voice.
It was the Curst. He had reappeared in the doorway, emerging into the light. His face was set. He was looking directly at Balthus Blackwards, who started in surprise to find another person present.
The Curst was aiming a pistol.
It was a huge, chromed thing, a revolver with two barrels, one of a regular size and a second of greater bore beneath it. It was an old, Guard-issue weapon, a Lammark Combination Thousander, a weapon for an officer, or for use in trench-war and street fighting.
The Curst thumbed the hammer back.
‘I recommend it,’ he said.
‘You have made the most appalling mistake, my friend,’ Blackwards hissed.
‘No, you’re wrong,’ said the Curst, his aim unwavering.