25 For 25

by Various

  ‘He did?’ Linder prompted, hoping for more detail. He couldn’t imagine Sitrus combing the property vendors, even on a friend’s behalf. Perhaps his new department had something to do with accommodation allocation, and he’d found out about it that way.

  ‘He’s helped a lot of people,’ Milena said. Her face was drawn and tense. ‘He’s a good man. Whatever some people say about him.’

  ‘People like Feris?’ Linder asked, and the woman nodded, suddenly tense again.

  ‘How do you know Feris?’ she asked, her left hand clenching as though closing on the butt of her gun. Her eyes fixed on Linder’s, disturbing in their intensity. She shifted, almost imperceptibly, a few millimetres further away from where he sat.

  ‘I don’t,’ Linder assured her, ‘and I don’t want to. He came to the scriptorium, not long after I voxed you, and threw his weight around.’

  Milena nodded. ‘I thought he was monitoring my vox calls. He’s probably hoping Harl gets in touch with me.’ A flash of panic illuminated her eyes. ‘If he does, they’ll be bound to catch him!’

  ‘He’s too clever for that,’ Linder assured her. ‘But why would the Arbites think he’s been doing anything wrong? The idea’s absurd.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Milena said, her voice blazing with indignation. ‘But Feris needs someone to blame, even if he can’t prove anything. When Harl disappeared, he just jumped to the conclusion that he must be guilty.’

  ‘More or less what he told me,’ Linder agreed. He hesitated a little before going on. ‘He did have another idea about what might have happened. But I’m afraid it’s rather unpleasant.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Milena said. ‘He suggested Harl’s been murdered, and someone’s trying to cover it up.’ She smiled, registering Linder’s shocked expression. ‘He tried the same trick on me. He doesn’t believe that any more than we do.’

  ‘Then why suggest it?’ Linder asked.

  Milena’s posture became a little less hunched. ‘To see if you’d let anything slip, of course. In case you were in on it.’

  ‘In on what?’ Linder began to feel completely out of his depth.

  ‘Whatever he imagines Harl was involved in,’ Milena said, as though explaining things to a child. I suppose it was at that point Linder first began to realise quite how out of his depth he was.

  ‘Have you any idea what that might be?’ he asked.

  The woman regarded him steadily. ‘Data falsification’s about the worst thing an Administratum adept could be accused of, isn’t it?’

  Linder nodded. ‘Short of heresy. I’m sure Harl told you that.’

  ‘He did.’ Milena’s voice was low, as if, even here, they might be overheard. ‘It wasn’t a decision he took lightly.’

  Linder felt the breath gush from his body, as though her words had been a physical blow. Slowly, he stood.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ he said, biting back the angry words seething behind his tongue. ‘I’m sorry to have intruded on you.’

  ‘Sit down and listen, damn it!’ Milena jumped up too, her fists clenched. ‘I told you, he did nothing wrong!’

  ‘You also just told me he falsified records,’ Linder snapped back, ‘and I’ve known him most of my life. Harl wouldn’t do something like that, whatever the reason.’

  ‘And I lived with him for more than half a year,’ Milena said, her voice softening. ‘Perhaps I saw a side of him you never did. But if you don’t want to know the truth, then leave. You know where the door is.’

  ‘All right.’ Linder seated himself again. The desire to make sense of the data was ruling him, as it always would. ‘I’m listening. But I don’t promise to believe you.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Milena breathed deeply, and began pacing the room. ‘I told you Harl found this place for me. Before he did, I had nothing. Literally. I’m from Vannick, and I was in one of the outhabs when the nuke went off. I’d just stepped into an underpass, crossing the Vervunhive road, at the time. A few seconds either way, and I’d have been vaporised, like everything else above ground. All my idents went up in the fireball, along with my home and my family.’ She took a long, shuddering breath, and Linder found himself wondering if she’d finished.

  ‘That’s...’ he began, but Milena cut him off with a sharp hand gesture.

  ‘Eventually, I made it here. It wasn’t easy, and I had to do a lot of things I never want to think about again. But without idents I couldn’t find a job, or a place to live. That limits your options, believe me.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Linder asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

  ‘Harl did. We got talking in a bar I used to work. Don’t get me wrong, he was never a client, but he used to drink there sometimes, and we got to know each other. One night I was in a bad way, and it all came pouring out. He never said much, but he listened, and the next time I saw him he gave me an ident. Genuine. Some Spiner girl who’d picked the wrong time to visit Vervunhive and never come back.’

  ‘I see.’ Linder thought about the unthinkable. In circumstances like that, the Sitrus he remembered might have been tempted to alter the records to help the woman. It would have been easy; he could even picture the expression on his friend’s face as he shuffled the requisite pieces of data round the cogitator net, the sardonic smile which never quite became a sneer. He’d seen it many times in their early years as lowly Archivists, generally directed at him, as he failed to follow Sitrus in some minor transgression of the regulations. Sitrus would have relished the challenge of getting away with it, although the risk of being caught would have been relatively low. Dealing with any hardprint copies that existed would have been a little more difficult, but not too much so; a Scribe’s robe could hide a great deal more than a few sheets of paper, and once they were gone, it would be easy to ascribe their loss to the turmoil of the war. ‘And something went wrong?’

  ‘No.’ Milena shook her head. ‘No one noticed. Not at first.’

  ‘At first?’ Linder tried to get his reeling thoughts under control. ‘What changed?’

  ‘Harl did, I suppose. He must have got overconfident. After he helped me, he decided to rescue some of the other dispossessed.’

  ‘Yes, he would.’ Linder nodded. Once he’d crossed the line, and got away with it, Sitrus would have been unable to resist the impulse to carry on outwitting his superiors. He was constitutionally incapable of refraining from pushing his luck. Sometimes that had been an asset, propelling him up the Administratum hierarchy at a rate some of their contemporaries had been openly envious of, and sometimes a liability; Linder had seen him lose a month’s remuneration on a single hand of cards before now.

  ‘Like I said, he’s a good man. And now Feris is treating him like a criminal!’ Milena paced the room, her slight frame seeming too frail to contain her boiling rage.

  ‘That must be why he wiped his records,’ Linder said, considering the matter as dispassionately as he could. ‘To protect you. With his access keys deleted from the system, there’s no way of telling which files he accessed.’

  He probably even believed that; a sufficiently devout tech-priest might be able to reconstruct them, given enough time to enact the proper rituals, but that kind of knowledge is well outside the purview of the Administratum.

  ‘You won’t tell Feris, will you?’ Milena asked, twisting her hands together anxiously.

  ‘Of course not,’ Linder said, wondering if it was true. A lifetime of devotion to his calling was warring within him against the demands of friendship and compassion. It was all too much to take in.

  ‘Thank you.’ Milena smiled, with genuine warmth for the first time, the tension suddenly draining from her body. Then, to Linder’s astonishment, she hugged him. ‘I’ve been so afraid without Harl.’

  ‘We’ll find him,’ Linder said, with a confidence he didn’t feel, and hesitantly returned the embrace.

  When he left, it was close to dawn, a faint greyish glow becoming visible through the clouds of smoke rising from
the manufactoria below and to the east. The rumble of industry continued unabated in the background, mere distinctions of day and night irrelevant to the vast majority of Kannack’s population. Up on the Spine, though, the affluent remained more aware of the diurnal round, and the streets were accordingly quiet, which forced my observers to keep their distance; otherwise things might have been concluded a great deal more quickly than they were.

  ‘Take this,’ Milena said suddenly, as Linder turned away from the closing door. He held out his hand automatically, and found his fingers wrapping themselves around the compact weight of the miniature autopistol she’d collected from the hall table before undoing the bolt. ‘I’ve got another.’

  ‘No thank you.’ The metal was cold, smelling faintly of lubricants, and the wooden butt felt warm where she’d been gripping it. It seemed astonishingly heavy for something so small, and Linder fumbled, almost dropping it. ‘I haven’t a clue how it works anyway.’

  ‘You point it and pull the trigger,’ Milena said. ‘It’s been blessed by a tech-priest to ensure accuracy. But you need to flick the safety off first.’ Noticing Linder’s blank expression, she smiled indulgently. ‘That’s the switch by your thumb.’

  Linder almost refused again, then stuffed the little firearm into the depths of his robe. The gift was well meant, and he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. ‘I’ll be in touch,’ he said instead, ‘as soon as I find out anything else.’ He wasn’t sure how he was going to do that, but had a vague idea of seeing if Klath remembered anything else Sitrus might have said about people or places he knew.

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ Milena said. ‘But come by anyway. I don’t see many people now Harl’s gone.’

  ‘I will,’ Linder promised, and was rewarded with another fleeting smile.

  The predawn wind was chill, unwarmed by the thermal currents rising from the industrial sectors, and Linder huddled deeper inside his robe as he hurried back towards the tunnel mouth leading to the enclosed depths of the hive below. His footsteps echoed eerily in the unaccustomed quiet, and the shadows between the waylamps seemed impenetrable pools of darkness. The tavern was open again as he passed it, if it had ever closed, the indefatigable zither player still going strong; he considered the unlikelihood of that for a moment, before realising it must have been a recording. His attention attracted by the music, he paused, considering the prospect of a reviving mug of caffeine and a warm butter roll, then dismissed the idea; he would be cutting the time of his arrival at the scriptorium fine enough as it was.

  But the brief hesitation was enough. As he listened to the echoes of his footfalls die away, another, caught unawares, smacked into the pavement at exactly the moment his next stride would have done.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Linder looked round, seeking the source of the sound, but the shadows between the waylights kept their secrets. Unbidden, his hand sought the suddenly comforting weight of the gun. ‘Come on out!’

  No one answered. Feeling vaguely foolish, and inclined to blame his fears on an overactive imagination, Linder began walking again, listening to the steady beat of echoes against the enclosing brickwork. His hand curled round the butt of the autopistol, the small excrescence of the safety catch snuggled against the ball of his thumb.

  Abruptly he turned, looking back the way he’d come, and was rewarded with a flash of movement, just leaving the pool of luminescence cast by the waylight behind him. Emboldened by the feel of the weapon in his hand, he took a step towards it, drawing the gun as he did so.

  ‘Who are you?’ he shouted. But the only answer he got was the slithering of shoe soles against cobbles, as his unseen pursuer turned and fled. A dark robe billowed for a moment in the cone of lamplight, and the diminishing echo of hurrying footsteps rebounded from the surrounding walls.

  I suppose most men of Linder’s profession would have resumed their journey at that point, perhaps with a brief prayer of thanks to the Throne for their deliverance, but, as I’ve noted before, he could be a stubborn fellow when the mood took him; and it took him then. Without any thought for his safety, he ran after the fleeting shadow, pausing now and then to catch his breath, and listen out for the fugitive echoes. The pursuit took him away from the thoroughfare he’d been following, ever deeper into a maze of alleyways, and thence inside the rising slope of the hive spine. He was vague about the details of the route he took, but I was able to reconstruct it later, bringing us to the market hall where he finally confronted his quarry.

  At that hour it was still deserted, the stalls shuttered and empty, but the floodlamps in the ceiling had been kindled, ready for the vendors to set out their wares, and Linder blinked in the sudden brightness. As his dazzled eyes adjusted, he heard more footfalls echoing between the stands, and rounded the corner of the nearest row, aiming the gun ahead of him.

  ‘Stop. Or I’ll shoot.’

  A hooded figure in a night-blue robe was crouched over a manhole cover in the middle of the aisle, frozen in the act of lifting it aside. It straightened slowly, and began to turn.

  ‘Would you really, Zale?’ The words were delivered in an amused drawl, as though the speaker was waiting for the punchline of a joke. ‘You should never make a threat you’re not prepared to carry out, you know. It makes you look weak.’

  ‘Harl?’ Linder lowered the weapon, stupefied with astonishment. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m sure Milena filled you in,’ Sitrus said, with a dismissive glance at the gun. ‘You must have made quite an impression on her. She doesn’t usually let other people play with her toys.’

  ‘She told me what you did for her,’ Linder said, tucking the weapon away, with a sudden flare of embarrassment.

  Sitrus shrugged. ‘It wasn’t hard. I’d been thinking for some time about how you could match up a dormant identity with just about anyone, and she seemed the perfect person to give it a try.’

  ‘Feris doesn’t seem to feel that way,’ Linder said, trying to assimilate this new and unexpected development. ‘If he finds you, he’ll charge you with record falsification at the very least.’

  ‘Feris couldn’t catch a cold showering naked in a blizzard,’ Sitrus said, with tolerant amusement. He glanced down at the manhole next to his feet. ‘But if you want to continue this conversation without interruption, we’d better get below. He’s annoyingly persistent, and he’s bound to have watchers trailing you.’

  ‘Why me?’ Linder asked, feeling his way down a rickety ladder. After a couple of metres his shoe soles scraped rockcrete, and he stepped aside to let his friend descend after him. The pillar of light from above cut off with a scrape and a clank as Sitrus replaced the iron cover, and the dimmer illumination of sparsely scattered glow-globes replaced it.

  ‘Because you might lead him to me,’ Sitrus said, the smile Linder had pictured so recently visible on his face as he stepped off the ladder into the gloom-shrouded tunnel. ‘You really are out of your depth here, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course I am!’ Linder snapped. ‘I’m a Scribe, not some dreg from the underhive! I’m not used to this kind of thing.’

  ‘You seem to have more of a knack for it than you think,’ Sitrus said. ‘Which is why I took the risk of bringing you here.’

  ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, I was chasing you,’ Linder said.

  Sitrus smiled again. ‘It saved a lot of explanation. If I’d approached you in the open, you’d start asking questions, and we’d still be talking when Feris’s plodders turned up. But I had intended getting a lot closer to this little bolthole before I let you see me.’ He nodded appreciatively. ‘You’re full of surprises, Zale.’

  ‘Then I’m not the only one.’ Linder fell into step with his friend, strolling along the dank utility duct as though they were ambling through a garden together. ‘What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Keep my head down, and wait for Feris to die of old age.’ Sitrus smiled again. ‘I set up a nice new life for myself before I erased the old one. I’ve got money, and connections, a
nd I can well afford a juvenat or two.’

  ‘Then why do you want to talk to me?’ Linder asked, as they descended a ramp into a vaulted brick gallery lined with humming power relays.

  ‘Because I trust you,’ Sitrus said, ‘and you were able to find Milena. I’d like you to pass on a message for me.’

  ‘Of course,’ Linder said. ‘She’s worried sick about you.’

  ‘Then you won’t mind putting her mind at rest. Just tell her I’m safe, and I’ve left the hive. Can you do that?’

  ‘Consider it done,’ Linder said. They were crossing a deep channel of lichen-encrusted brick, along which some thick tarry liquid flowed sluggishly into the distance, their footsteps ringing on the metal mesh bridge spanning it. ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Sitrus said, the half-contemptuous smile back on his face. ‘You’re already sticking your neck out more than you’re comfortable with.’

  ‘I’ll decide what I’m comfortable with,’ Linder snapped. For the last year he’d been living outside the shadow cast by his friend, and he’d forgotten how annoyingly superior he could sometimes seem.

  ‘Good for you.’ Sitrus stopped walking, and looked at him appraisingly in the light from a nearby glow-globe. They’d reached a nexus of tunnels, half a dozen radiating from the circular chamber they found themselves in. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. ‘There are plenty more like Milena, you know. Desperate, with nowhere to turn, and I can’t help them anymore. But if you’re willing to take the risk, you could.’

  ‘Me?’ For a moment Linder was too stunned even to speak. When he forced the syllable out, it sounded more like a strangulated gasp than an intelligible word.

  Sitrus nodded. ‘You could give them their lives back, Zale.’ Then he shrugged. ‘Somebody’s life, anyway. It’s got to be better than the one they have now.’

  ‘Falsify records?’ Linder felt nauseous at the very idea. ‘No, I couldn’t.’