The Encoded Heart

by Peter J Evans

  Harrow glanced in the direction he thought she meant. He could see nothing there but debris. "Ketta?"

  "Goodbye, mutant." She stood. "Try not to fall in love with her."

  He grinned. "Too late."

  "I know that."

  With that, she was gone. The hatch closed up, and a moment later the ship turned in the air and darted away.

  Harrow felt the backdraft tug his clothes. He watched the daggership slice the air over the canopy, heading north-east. Its wings waggled a few kilometres away - a signal? - and then the ship pointed its nose to the stars and powered upwards. A heartbeat or two, and it was out of sight.

  The case was heavy in his hands. He stared at it, turned it over, triggered the catch and lifted the lid a fraction.

  And slammed it closed. "My God," he breathed.

  It would take him a couple of hours to get to where Ketta had indicated with the tilt of her wings. After seeing what lay in the case, he knew that was where he needed to be.

  Could an Iconoclast special agent and a mutant of the Tenebrae cult be allies? Even for an hour or two? It was insane. Then again, Judas Harrow lived in an insane universe. Anything could happen.

  With that thought fixed in his head, he headed off, up the hill and into the burning trees.

  17. THE LAST SUPPER

  Durham Red was utterly without words.

  She had thought that she was beyond shock or surprise. This deranged universe had delivered shock after shock to her, battering her with wonders from the moment she had climbed out of the cryo-tube on Wodan. She had seen spiders as big as cities and monsters the size of worlds, had watched planets burn and whole populations put to the sword in her name. She had walked on the surface of the Moon with only a coat to protect her, had stood before a spinning pulsar and felt its warmth on her cheek. Yet none of these things, or a hundred like them, had rendered her as speechless as seeing this one man sitting in front of her.

  It seemed to amuse him. But then, by now, most things did.

  "You're gaping," said the Gothking. "You have pretty teeth, my dear, but please close your mouth. You have no idea what might fly in."

  "You're not real," Red breathed. She shook her head, slowly. "You can't be."

  "Oh, I can assure you that I am. As real as I was, oh, when did we last meet? Lethe, I believe." He sat back and steepled his fingers, still with that faintly amused half smile on his lips. "I told you then that you weren't much to look at. Your dress sense hasn't improved much in the last twelve hundred years."

  "Nearly thirteen," Red murmured absently. "And these aren't mine."

  "I'm so glad to hear it." He turned his attention to Sorrelier, who took a step backwards in what seemed a reflexive jolt of guilt. "And Sire Vaide."

  Sorrelier looked both confused and acutely uncomfortable. There was no way he could have known who the man sitting up on the dais was, merely the anonymous ruler he was intending to assassinate, but the Magister's reaction unsettled him. "My Lord," he muttered.

  "I'm almost sorry your little plot fell at the first hurdle, Vaide," D'Isis purred. "It would have been fun to see it unfold, and I always try to encourage forward-thinking among my subjects. But you might have spoiled the last dance, and that would have been a pity."

  "Dance?" asked Red. Her brain was starting to get back into gear, slowly. "What dance?"

  "A little soiree I've arranged in your honour, my dear." He stood up, leaning slightly on the cane he carried in his right hand, a metre of polished ebony topped with a silver skull. "Nothing much. A few friends, a little wine. Just a diversion from the coming troubles, but it should still have its charms." He looked from Red to Sorrelier, and back again. "Well now, you might try to look a bit pleased. It's not often I grant an audience these days, and rarer still that I offer hospitality."

  "Hospitality!" Red shook herself, and stepped forwards. "Look, this is insane. You should be dead a thousand years, and instead you're standing here inviting us to a party!"

  "I'm sure you have questions," said D'Isis, starting down the steps.

  "Snecking right I do!"

  The interruption brought a warning glance. "Manners. There are clearly things you'd like to know. And you will, believe me. When the time comes, you will."

  "But-"

  "Ah!" He raised a hand to silence her, then turned the gesture to one of invitation, motioning her to one of the chamber's doors. "I'm sure you wouldn't like to keep anyone waiting."

  She followed him, along with Sorrelier and Lise, out of the chamber and along a narrow, ornate corridor. The décor of the Magister's rooms was nothing short of breathtaking, a dizzying fusion of marble and jet, diamond and gold. Light came from illuminated ceiling panels, hand-wrought with startling scenes of erotica, and the floor was a polished chequerboard of inlaid gems.

  Red walked some distance behind the Gothking, watching his every move. There had to be some flaw in his performance, something about the impostor striding ahead of her that would reveal the truth of him. There was some trick here, some falsehood, of that she was certain. The only other explanation was that D'Isis had walked into a cryo-tube not long after she had, and she couldn't believe that. It didn't fit the history - he wouldn't have had time to found the Magadan colony if he'd been frozen.

  Besides, it simply wasn't his style.

  She felt Sorrelier draw close to her as she walked. "What's going on?" he said. "What in the name of the Prime were you two talking about back there?"

  Red opened her mouth to explain, then closed it again. There wasn't time, and she didn't have the energy. "Trust me, you don't want to know."

  "I'll be the judge of that."

  "No, you'll be the bloke with the gun, okay?" He started to protest but she waved him away. "Listen, just keep that needler handy. And when I give you the word, don't hesitate. I've got a really bad feeling about this."

  "You're not the only..." Sorrelier trailed off. "What are they doing here?"

  "Who?" Red's attention had been on Sorrelier, she hadn't seen the Gothking stop at the end of the corridor. He was waiting next to a door, both hands clasped over the top of his walking cane.

  Four men had appeared to stand alongside him; two at his left hand, two on his right.

  "Guards," Red muttered. "It figures."

  "Those aren't guards. Those are servilants." Sorrelier slowed, hanging back. "I don't like the look of this."

  As Red got closer to the new arrivals she began to see what Sorrelier meant. There was nothing martial in the servilants' dress or bearing, just a slack-jawed emptiness, a lifelessness that made sylphs look vital and alert. They stood as though their shaven heads had been nailed to the air, and their bodies left to dangle below.

  All of them were dressed in long, glossy coats of pale green, studded with pockets and fastenings. Bright, gleaming things stuck out of those pockets in neat rows.

  There were stains on the servilants' coats, dots and smears that made Red's nose itch as she stepped alongside.

  The Gothking turned to flash Red a smile. "It's time," he said. "As you are my guests, I'll announce you."

  Seeing that smile, Red's stomach knotted. There was something horribly wrong besides the Gothking's anachronisms. She could hear noises coming from beyond the panelled door, muted shufflings and murmurs, the scrape of furniture on polished floors. That, and a kind of rapid, repetitive tapping, as though someone with a wooden spoon were beating a faint tattoo upon a china plate. "Gothking-"

  "Please," he said gently. "Call me Simon. You're among friends here."

  He pushed the door open.

  Red cried out, covering her mouth with one hand. Dimly, she heard Sorrelier curse behind her, and then D'Isis, with surprising strength, grabbed them both by the shoulder and propelled them into the room. "Ladies and gentlemen, Sire Vaide Sorrlier, and the Lady Durham Red!"

  It was a dining hall, long and high-ceilinged, lit by chandeliers and dozens of flickering candles. The walls were white marble, trimmed with gold
and set with panels of rose quartz. The furniture - a long dining table and chairs, side-tables and consoles hugging the walls - was smooth oak and soft, wine-dark leather.

  The stench was indescribable.

  As D'Isis had intimated, there were guests here. In fact, of the twenty or so chairs available, only three stood unoccupied. In the others men and women sat, facing the table as though in anticipation of a feast. From what Red could see of them, though, eating was the last thing on their minds.

  The Gothking's guests had been bound to their chairs, stout leather straps tugged tight into protesting flesh, and each bore a catalogue of wounds. Some ghastly fusion of surgery and torture, mutilation and cuisine, had taken place, like a gourmet's most surreal and bloody nightmare. Several of the guests were plainly dead, lolling in their straps, but the majority were still, distressingly, alive.

  None, though, had been left capable of speech.

  Red saw a man whose whole skull had been flayed, the skin of his face cut into strips and served to him on salad. There was a woman with her mouth opened into a gaping, circular wound, head down over a bowl of blood and teeth. Across the table was a quivering wreck, rendered sexless by its injuries, with skin more cut and sliced than intact. Horrible visions, every one, the living mewling and mumbling in their agonies, the dead swollen and stinking where they sat.

  "I'd like to introduce the Board of Arch-Domini," said D'Isis. "You'll forgive them for not getting up. Impolite of them, I know, but we can't have everything. Oh, here's a friend of yours."

  He touched the shoulder of one of the ruined men. Red saw the eyes roll towards her, agonised and beseeching. His eyelids had been sliced carefully away, and he stared out from twin puddles of congealed blood. Below that, his lips had been stitched shut, but worse still were the man's hands. The skin and muscle had been carved away from them, leaving skeletal claws, held together only by strings of tendon and random shreds of muscle.

  On the plate in front of him were the parts he was missing: eyelids, tongue, the meat of his hands, arranged on the china-like nouvelle cuisine, and as he shivered and quaked in shock his finger bones rattled the plate - the tattoo she had heard from outside.

  "I'm sure you recognise Sire Saleph Losen," the Gothking said, smiling down at the man. "I had high hopes for this one, but he proved something of a disappointment. He encouraged Sorrelier to kidnap you at the Masque, led him on quite atrociously, just so they could expose his plots to me." He patted Losen's quivering head, as though comforting a favourite dog. "And there's Sire Brakkeri, with whom he conspired." He began moving along the line of bleeding Domini. "Normally I'd ignore their little indiscretions, even applaud that sort of behaviour, but to be honest I no longer have any use for the game."

  "You're snecking insane," Red managed to say. She was barely staying upright, shock and nausea threatening to unbalance her at any second. Just as she thought she had seen some of the most shocking sights in the universe, she had thought herself immune to horror before she had stumbled into this awful feast. She had been wrong on both counts.

  Sorrelier stepped unsteadily past her, his eyes fixed on Losen's wreck of a face. "Insane," he agreed, gasping. "A madman. By the Prime, I wished this whelp dead enough times, but..." Words failed him, and he trailed to silence, shaking his head as if to dislodge what he had seen.

  Red started backing away. D'Isis looked up at her. "Leaving so soon? I'm not sure I can allow that. After all, I went to a lot of trouble to arrange this."

  As he spoke, the four servilants stepped in through the doorway, moving with clockwork precision. As one, they reached into pockets in their discoloured garments, drawing forth glittering metal objects that caught the candle-light; shears and hooks, needles and saws. All the instruments that had flayed Losen and the Board, eager for more harm.

  Red stopped where she was, caught between the servilants and their master. There was nothing remotely sentient about these drooling surgeons, she could see that at a glance. They were puppets, and the Gothking had their strings. "Call them off, D'Isis."

  "Sit down like a good girl, and they'll be gone."

  "No chance."

  "A pity. We have much to talk about, you and I."

  "There's been enough talk," Sorrelier snarled. He had the needle-gun in his fist, and Red saw it come up, smooth and fast to centre on the Gothking's face. "No!" she cried, in spite of herself. "Don't-"

  Sorrelier's finger whitened on the trigger.

  D'Isis didn't move. It was Lise that sprang into motion, darting up behind Sorrelier and ripping the gun from his grasp. A single needle sprang up, striking crystal from a chandelier.

  Sorrelier span, gaping. "Lise!"

  "I'm sorry," said the Gothking. Bizarrely, he sounded as if he meant it. "She's programmed. I'm the one person she can't possibly let you harm."

  That final betrayal was too much for Sorrelier. Maybe he could have taken the horror all around him, braved the atrocities, but for his beloved sylph to turn against him must have been the final crack in his mental armour. He howled, wordlessly, into his Magister's face, then turned and bolted towards the servilants.

  They stepped aside, and he ran between them.

  Red heard his footsteps vanish down the hall. Beside her, D'Isis was leading Lise to one of the empty chairs. She sat, blank-faced as ever, between two men gutted wide open. "At least one of my guests has the grace to sit."

  "This has gone far enough, D'Isis. Or whoever the sneck you are." From the corner of her eye Red saw the servilants banding together again. She wasn't going to be allowed out as easily as Sorrelier. "I don't know what the hell you're playing at here, but it ends now."

  "You're absolutely right," he replied. "All this has gone quite far enough." He made an airy, all-encompassing gesture. "And this is where it ends."

  She lashed out in fury, sweeping dishes from the table. "Will you stop talking in bloody riddles!"

  "Sit, then. And I'll explain."

  "You're mad!"

  "I don't enjoy being defied, little girl," he growled. The smile was gone from his face, and behind her Red heard the servilants take a reflexive step forwards. "And I'm disappointed that you, the great predator, would shy away from a little meat. So sit down while it's still a voluntary action!"

  As the words left his lips, the chandeliers dimmed.

  It was only for a moment, a second or two while the room's power levels dipped, but it was enough. Red actually heard the drop in electricity, a barely audible lowering of a background hum so pervasive she'd not even noticed it was there. She also heard the servilants shift position very subtly, as though their master's control of them was affected too. One of Sorrelier's system failures, maybe.

  Whatever the cause, to Durham Red it was an opportunity to put an end to this insanity once and for all. She leapt at the Gothking.

  She was fast, she knew, blindingly so, and her fury leant her even more speed. No matter how the Gothking had survived all this time, no matter what power he had in this world, she was going to put an end to him. She came at him like a missile.

  He stepped aside, and batted her across the room.

  It was like being struck by a sledgehammer. Red went spinning past the table, catching a corpse with her foot, a living man with her hand, and the three of them struck the wall together. A console shattered as they struck it, pieces of oak hitting the ceiling. Red bounced from the wreckage and rolled onto the floor. The guests she had plucked from the table, both corpses now, fell with her, chairs and all.

  The Gothking was stronger than she could have imagined.

  She struggled out of the wreckage, expecting him to come after her, but he left it to the servilants. Two of them were hurtling across the dining room towards her, blades at the ready, hooks dripping. She felt a flensing knife part the air above her head.

  She brought her foot up, planting the sole of her boot against the servilant's chest, and shoved him back. He crashed away, spitting blood. She'd kicked him hard enough to
cave his sternum in.

  The second one came at her, but she was on her feet, and he never stood a chance. She grabbed his face and leapt, powering up and away from the wall, riding the servilant all the way over in an arc until his skull shattered against the hard floor. Grey pulp and circuitry spattered across the tiles.

  Red jumped away from him, and dived at the Gothking again.

  He struck at her a second time, but she was ready for that. She ducked under the blow, twisting her body sideways as she went past him, reaching out to grab the walking cane and tear it from his grasp. As she came up behind him she whirled with it, swinging the metal skull at the end around in a humming arc that terminated, with shattering force, on the side of his head.

  There was a crunch that Red felt all the way up her arm, and the cane shattered. D'Isis twisted clear around, and then sagged onto the floor, the right of his skull caved inwards. There was a dent in his head she could have put her fist into. Red dropped to her knees next to him, ignoring the pain he had ignited within her, and sank her teeth into his throat.

  As soon as she did so she realised that it was a mistake. The texture of his skin was wrong, the smell of him was wrong. Even his sweat was a warning, a sterile mix of water and artificial grease. But her fangs were already biting through to the core of him, the vampiric reflex so strong in her that she couldn't unlock her jaws again before it was too late. Beneath the Gothking's throat, its workings tasted sour, warm and metallic, as Red's teeth parted its inner covering.

  There was a brilliant flash, and a feeling like being hit full in the face with a baseball bat. The floor came up and hit her in the back of her head. She was flung away from her potential meal so fast and hard that she hadn't even felt herself move. She was simply there one moment, and on her back the next, with a mouthful of skin.

  Not even his flesh was real. She spat it out and rolled over, trying to get to her feet before the Gothking could recover and finish her. But he was going nowhere. Half his neck was hanging off, with fluids gushing across the marble - not blood but greyish, watery stuff, shot through with sparks and wisps of smoke. The Gothking's body jerked and twisted rhythmically, the same motion over and over again. He was broken, a clockwork toy with his gears knocked askew.