The Encoded Heart

by Peter J Evans

  Her stomach growled. "Shut up," she told it.

  It had been a while since she'd eaten, and too long since she'd been properly nourished. She could fill her belly with food, and enjoy it, but it was blood that she really needed. Nothing else would sustain her, no matter how full she felt. Without a supply of fresh blood, Durham Red could starve to death in a restaurant.

  She licked her fangs, feeling the sharp points of them against her tongue, and thought about biting Vaide Sorrelier.

  That, Red was certain, would be a meal worth taking, and when she finally sat down to it she'd not stop until she was full and Sorrelier was an empty husk.

  She could almost see him, moving among the sylphs she had fought, casting an appraising eye over the wounded as though sorting through broken crockery. She had seen him gesture at one he must have considered worth saving, waving another's agonies away with the merest brush of his hand. Only the nerve-blocking drug she was sedated with prevented her from leaping forward and ripping the head from his neck.

  If only she'd recovered from the stuff sooner. Red scowled and booted a nearby pebble out into the rain, trying to forget what the drug's effects felt like. Whatever concoction had been on his sylph's fingernails it had been viciously potent. One scratch had turned her to water where she stood. Thankfully she had been able to fight the stuff off, just as she had Losen's happy juice back at the Masque. Sorrelier clearly hadn't expected her to recover from it at all.

  Her physiology and metabolism must have been very different from that of the average Magadani.

  Red shook her head, violently, whipping some of the rain from her hair. Thinking about Sorrelier was making her feel angry and hungry at the same time, not a great combination for a girl with little but a long walk in the rain to look forward to. But there was something about the man that forced her mind to keep curving back to him, a nagging edge of familiarity that she couldn't set aside.

  His similarity to the Gothking, probably. Now that she knew the connection between the Magadani and Simon of Isis, she could see how alike Sorrelier and her old nemesis were.

  Betrayers, poisoners, drug fiends... The two could have been twins.

  Red rubbed her shoulder through the sodden coat, trying to remember how long it had been since she and the Gothking had last crossed swords. Four years, she guessed, since he had gatecrashed that party on Lethe to tell her that the price was finally off her head. Maybe five.

  Suddenly the right answer came to her, and she barked out a laugh. Almost thirteen hundred years had gone by since she had last met Simon D'Isis - while she had slept the centuries away, he had died and gone to dust. It felt like nothing to her; the memory of his face was still fresh in her mind, but he must have grown old wondering where she had hidden herself, his dark hair going grey, his angular features sagging, his gallows wit leaving him one brain cell at a time. Maybe, deep in the court he had built for himself on the planet Isis, the Gothking had faded into memory with her name on his lips.

  It was an oddly pleasing thought, but it was far more likely that D'Isis had died at the hands of a rival, or even that the law had finally caught up with him. One doesn't become the head of a drugs syndicate spanning hundreds of planets without making a few enemies.

  In either case, Simon D'Isis was dead a thousand years, remembered only by one rather soggy mutant and a castle full of social climbers who couldn't even get his name right.

  "Nice legacy," Red muttered, thinking aloud. "How the mighty have fallen, eh Simon?"

  Sneck, she was talking to dead men. She'd been standing there too long, the sound of the rain hypnotising her. It was time to be away.

  Red cursed under her breath, pulled the collar of her drenched, sagging coat up over her head, bent forwards and stepped out into the rain.

  There had been a time, back in her days as a Search/Destroy agent, when D'Isis and his people had been the most dangerous part of Red's life, although it was a matter between her and a man called Jayem that had started the trouble. Jayem was a drug dealer, the head of a minor criminal operation who distributed psychoactive compounds of esoteric manufacture and brutal intensity. Someone Red had known well, and liked a lot, had died from Jayem's wares. So Red had gone after him - and, after a calamity or two, had got close enough to him to express her displeasure.

  He hadn't survived it.

  Which would have been the end of things, had Jayem not been the nephew of the Gothking, a different kind of man entirely. While Jayem had been a brute, his uncle was refined. Jayem was a fool, but Simon of Isis possessed a frightening intelligence. And Jayem was in his grave, and out of the picture, while the Gothking rapidly became the focus of all the woes in Durham Red's world.

  The Gothking's empire was vast: it spanned cities, nations, worlds, webbing whole sectors together in a network of illicit profit, and that had made Red's life very difficult indeed. There had been few enough places she could go to get away from trouble, even before she had come to the Gothking's attentions. Once his eye was on her, she was hunted wherever she went.

  Eventually, the price he had placed on her head - more for threatening his authority than for the killing of his nephew, as the two men had never been close - had become insanely huge. Red had been forced to take extreme measures in order to get the Gothking off her back.

  They had worked, after a fashion, although her plans had cost the life of a good friend. D'Isis had visited her on Lethe, during that friend's post-funeral party, to let Red know that her debt was cancelled, as long as she stayed out of his way.

  Well, she had stayed out of his way for a very long time indeed.

  As she walked Red found herself mentally cursing Sorrelier and his kin for bringing such foul memories back to mind. She'd largely forgotten about the Gothlord - this new universe she had awoken to boasted horrors that made his influence pale in comparison. He was in her head again, which was yet another reason to make life unpleasant for Vaide Sorrelier the next time they met.

  That, of course, would depend on whether Red ever found her way out of Magadan's increasingly unpleasant wilderness.

  It had finally stopped raining, the deluge turning first to drizzle and then to a watery mist. As it did so the landscape around her changed again, quite rapidly. The mud and grass were replaced by broken stone, the vegetation became scraggy and beaten until it finally faded out altogether. Before long Red was standing in a place where nothing grew at all.

  The ground beneath her boots was pale grey, a kind of compacted, dusty gravel topped with layers of flat, shale-like stones. The air was cold, misty, a deepening, colourless twilight. There was no sign of a sun above her, or a moon on the horizon. Other than a few boulders scattered around, nothing broke the monochrome drabness surrounding her.

  Red shivered. Somehow, this was worse than the rain and the mud. That had just been uncomfortable, but at least it had been alive. Where she was standing was a dead place, the corpse of a world.

  She began to trudge away.

  The ground started to slope upwards, rising into what looked like a series of low hills. Red climbed up a little way then paused, listening for any signs of danger, sniffing the air.

  Nothing. Just dead rocks and dust and mist.

  Far away, past the bottom of the slope and the scrubby hillocks beyond, past the gradual darkening into muddy fields and boulder-strewn woodland and drenched mountains of debris, the Grand Keep rose like a knife hilt, buried blade-deep in the surface of Magadan. From this distance there was no solidity to it. It was flat, like a paper cut-out, a tall rectangle of blue-grey against the darkening sky.

  Red turned to the hills again, glad to put the awful place at her back, and started to climb.

  The going wasn't easy, but she'd known worse. The slope seemed quite constant, with little in the way of irregularities to trip her, although the flat rocks sometimes slid beneath her boots. The mist, however, was not so constant, and thickened continually. Red had expected it to thin out as she climbed higher, but th
e stuff stubbornly refused to conform to any physical law she knew, and just kept getting worse.

  Eventually there came a point when the mist became so solid that Red was utterly blinded by it. A jolt of panic jumped in her chest, but as soon as it flared in her she felt the incline reverse direction. She had reached the peak of the hill, and was now heading downslope.

  The mist, finally, began to thin.

  Red felt herself grinning. The old excitement, the need to see what lay beyond the next corner, was back in control, that curiosity that had led her on so many adventures, into so much peril. She began to speed up, skittering down the rocky slope, hearing the pebbles slide along with her in dry, rattling avalanches behind her bootheels.

  It was with some disappointment, then, that she saw the vista opening up in front of her was very much like the one she had left behind. The boulders were of similar dimensions, the mist was just as chilly, the sky as featureless as before. Even the landscape at the limits of her vision was-

  She stopped dead where she was, gaping. The Keep loomed ahead of her.

  Red blinked, rubbed her eyes with her fists, but to no avail. There was no mistaking it. It wasn't a structure of similar dimensions. The scene in front of her was the same as the one she had left. There was no difference at all. Even the marks her boots had left among the gravel were there, a few metres to her right.

  She was right back where she had started.

  "Oh no," she growled menacingly, at no one in particular. "Don't give me that. No way did I turn around."

  But there was no denying the evidence, whether she did so out loud or not. Somewhere, up in that thickening mist, she had slipped or changed her direction so subtly she'd not even noticed, then happily trotted back down the same slope like an idiot.

  "Shit," she cursed. There was nothing for it but to go up again, and do it properly this time.

  On the next ascent, she remained resolutely focussed on her direction. Every few paces up the slope she would pause, and turn to look at the trail of footprints she had made, then carry on, eyes fixed ahead. Her night-vision did her no good at all, and the mist became more and more blinding as she got higher. Once again, there came a time when she could see nothing through it at all.

  That was where she had made her mistake last time. Very carefully, ignoring the panic fluttering behind her ribs, she took one long, straight stride over the brow of the hill and onto the downwards slope.

  This time she knew, as surely as she knew anything, that she was heading the right way.

  Which made her curse all the louder when she got far enough down the hill to see the Keep again.

  It was unbelievable, impossible. She could make a mistake like that once. After all, she'd not been concentrating, had been thinking too much about Gothking and his strange legacies. Lost in those thoughts, she could very easily have accidentally retraced her steps. But the second time, she had been careful.

  There was only one thing for it. She ran sideways along the slope, well away from her previous route, and made the journey again.

  The results were exactly, distressingly, the same.

  Red gave up, dropping to her haunches on the dry rocks. The Keep reared up in front of her, just as it had before.

  "Just what," she asked desperately, "is going on?"

  Her only answer came from the sky. The low growl of engines, changing course.

  Red stood up and waved. She couldn't see the flier, but she could feel the vibration of it through her boots, in her hair and her teeth. She should run - she knew that to stand still and attract the vessel's attention was an insane thing to do. She would be captured, returned to the clutches of the people she most desired to be away from.

  But there was nothing here for her but madness. The only way she would get off Magadan - if indeed there was a way off - lay through answers, not shoe leather. And those answers lay in just one place.

  The drone of the flier's engines changed tone. Red watched it emerge from the mist, landing with its legs extended, and prepared to go back to the Grand Keep.

  13. NOCTURNAL PREDATORS

  Night began to fall before Harrow and Godolkin reached the source of the power spikes. Their plan, back when the sun had just risen, had been to slog uninterrupted through the forest along the path Hunter had mapped for them, and to reach their destination before it grew dark. That strategy, however, was now irrevocably changed.

  They moved slowly, and silently when they could. Both walked with weapons drawn and primed, staying separated by a few metres, each watching the forest at his side. When the undergrowth grew too thick to move in that manner they took it in turns to forge ahead - one man would lower his gun to cut a path through the greenery, while the other would hold position and keep watch. Then when the scout had gone far enough they would swap roles.

  Ten hours had passed like this, pacing forward together or in leap-frog fashion, and their progress had dropped to a crawl. But to go faster would have been to invite death. Ever since the encounter at Ketta's daggership, Harrow and Godolkin had been hunted.

  There were more Omegas out among the trees, how many could only be guessed at. One of the two warriors that had attacked them in the ruins had survived, and escaped into the forest. There was no telling how long she had survived - according to Godolkin, her wounds had been extensive - but it must have been long enough for her to alert the others.

  This had already been proved several times during the day. If it hadn't been for Godolkin's martial skill, he and Harrow might have been discovered and killed on three or four occasions. One time, an Omega had passed so close to Harrow's hiding place that he had been able to smell the warrior's sweat, to hear his breathing.

  Harrow was certain that the Omegas had never been more than a kilometre away from them since the ruins.

  It was a nerve-shredding, terrifying situation. But in spite of the fear, Harrow was almost glad of the lessening in pace. His encounter with the Omega warrior had left him battered and shaken: the gouges on his face and neck stung and itched beneath their covering of hardened antiseptic foam, and his chest ached from the blows he had taken. In other circumstances he would have liked nothing better than to lie down and sleep for a week, but that could never be an option here. Besides, after he had defeated one of the Omegas single-handed, his pride wouldn't let him.

  Soon, he hoped, Durham Red would discover how he had prevailed against the enhanced Iconoclast, without asking for a moment's respite afterwards.

  All he had to do was find her.

  The terrain had taken another one of its downward slopes, although it was often hard to tell; the greenery here was so thick that it obscured the ground completely. Harrow crouched near the base of a tree and watched Godolkin use his silver blade to scythe a way through, cutting through the tall, pulpy stalks that grew around the tree boles, severing loops of vine and glossy, hanging leaves the size of bedsheets.

  It was hot. Harrow sweated under his mesh jacket and resisted the impulse to scratch his wounds. The Omega's hooks had gone deep into him, and although Godolkin had sprayed his cuts with bio-foam they still itched horribly. The temptation to rip at them with his fingernails was horribly strong, but he forced himself to resist: there was no telling what kinds of infections lurked in this steaming hell, and which might have the tenacity to find a home in an alien bloodstream. There was a chance, since he had not evolved on Ashkelon, that the forest's local diseases might have no foothold in his system, leaving him free to walk with open wounds and drink whatever water he found. But it wasn't a risk he was prepared to take.

  Instead he concentrated on keeping Godolkin in his gunsights.

  The Iconoclast was nearly out of view. He could normally go much farther before needing to stop and let Harrow overtake him, but the light was failing fast. Harrow was just about to signal him when he saw the man stop, raise his head slightly, then turn around and pad back along the path he had cut.

  "What do you smell?" Harrow asked him, as he reac
hed the tree. He was starting to trust the Iconoclast's sense of smell better than his own eyesight, especially in this dwindling light.

  Godolkin crouched next to him. "Ozone."

  The smell of electricity. They must have been closer to their objective than he had thought. "Close by?"

  "Reasonably. At this pace, perhaps half an hour."

  Harrow frowned. At the rate the light was failing, half an hour would put them in pitch darkness. Hacking their way through the forest was dangerous enough in daylight, but Harrow didn't even want to attempt it in the dark. It would be just his luck to trip over and break a limb so close to the journey's end.

  Until now, the problem had never arisen. By the time darkness fell Harrow was usually at the end of his strength anyway, and more than ready to make camp for the night. He was tired enough to do the same. But if there was a way of getting to the source of that ozone smell without waiting until morning he would happily forgo sleep, and make up the difference later. "Godolkin, do you have your sense-enhancers?"

  The Iconoclast had a set of enhancer-goggles as part of his basic equipment. Harrow lacked the surgery required to make use of most of their functions, but knew the image-intensifiers were probably powerful enough for his eyes too.

  "I have. In fact, I was about to suggest you try them anyway."

  "Really?" It wasn't like Godolkin to offer his wargear to Harrow. The man tended to guard it jealously, probably thinking it would be tainted if used by a mutant. "That's generous of you."

  "No, it's not. But there are Omega warriors between us and the source of the ozone. I am more likely to survive an encounter with them if I am not encumbered by a blind man."