by Col Buchanan
The voices beyond the door fell to a deathly hush.
‘Shall we?’ she asked him.
‘After you.’
Fifty faces were turned to the door as Swan stepped through it. Eyes widened as they saw her priestly robe and her smooth skull; even the crying infant in the lap of its mother blinked at her through its tears.
Swan snapped her fingers loudly, and the infant stopped crying with a startled jerk.
The room was packed from wall to wall with seated men and women, the air thick with the heat of so many bodies pressed so closely together.
How can they sit like this, in each other’s stench?
‘We’re looking for Gant,’ her brother declared, loudly. ‘Please show him to us.’
Nobody moved. The man standing at the front of the room wrung his hands in dismay.
‘Are you Gant?’ Swan asked him.
He looked to the others for support, and Swan noticed a few men along the sides reaching beneath their coats for weapons.
‘Who wants to know?’
It was a man standing by the shuttered window, his arms folded across his burly chest. He had a pipe in his mouth, and a peaked cap on his head cocked over one eye.
‘I do.’
‘And you are?’
‘They call me Swan.’
‘Well, Swan, they call me Gant. And this is a peaceful assembly. We’re doing nothing wrong here.’
Her brother snorted. ‘I would say that planning dissent amongst your fellow chattel is very wrong indeed.’
Chairs began to scuff against the floor. People were standing, moving back towards the walls. A handful of men were taking up positions around them.
‘No trouble,’ Swan said with her empty palms raised. She nodded to the man Gant. ‘Good evening to you, then. Or what remains of it.’
Slowly, with caution, they both backed out of the room, their task here complete. Swan took a final glimpse of Gant’s curious expression then pulled the door closed behind her.
Instantly, her brother broke a bonding stick in half and used it to seal the door in its frame. The door handle rattled; someone trying to open it.
The voices grew loud again on the other side.
Swan and her brother hurried down the stairwell, racing each other. The Respite House was a tall building with many floors and rooms. Perhaps it had been an hostalio in its time, or one of the famous brothels of the district. People had scattered from the stairs and the landings when they’d first seen the two of them go up. Now, mutters sounded from behind closed doors, children’s cries stifled suddenly. Swan broke her own bonding stick in half, and helped Guan close the main exit of every landing as they descended, sealing each one in turn.
Her brother wouldn’t meet her eye as they did it.
Outside in the cobbled street, a stinking breeze was blowing down the narrow stretch of the Accenine – the only river on the island of Q’os – and amongst the twisting, diabolical streets of the slums that were the Shambles. The fumes from the nearby steelworks caught in the back of her throat, dark smokestacks pouring their affluence into the evening sky. Guan worked quickly to seal the main front door while Swan thrummed to her inner music, and observed the figures scurrying from the sight of their robes.
She stared at the distant Temple of Whispers above the skyline, a tall, warped sliver amongst smaller skysteeples. It was more brightly lit than before. She knew that the second night of the Caucus must be starting by now; felt a moment’s relief that they did not have to be there again tonight.
Much closer, on the opposite bank of the fast river, the Lefall family fortress stood in a brilliance of focused gaslights. Barges were filling up with soldiers along the quayside: General Romano’s own private troops, shipping down to the harbour for the fleet’s departure tomorrow. Swan still had to pack, she recalled, and see to it that her new house-slave understood how to care properly for her animals.
Guan nudged her side, and she returned to the business at hand.
He took out his pistol and stood watch as she lifted one of the unlit brands they’d left leaning against the wall. Swan aimed her own pistol at it and fired.
The oil-soaked wood ignited and a blue-orange flame sputtered in the breeze. Quickly now, Swan ran the torch along the side of the wall, leaving a trail of fire that quickly climbed upwards where they’d splashed it with oil.
She circled the building, leaving her brother where he stood, passing the two other doors they’d already sealed. By the time she returned to him, the entire structure was sheathed by flames.
Banging on the front door now. People trying to get out.
‘Remind me again: why aren’t the Regulators handling this one?’
‘Because, sister, the Matriarch’s family owns half the linen mills in the Shambles. No doubt she wanted the job done right.’
The sounds of panic were starting to compete with the roaring of the flames. Shutters were being thrown open across the building, people hanging out amongst spumes of smoke.
‘You think this will work?’
‘Maybe at least they’ll stop banging on about rights for a while. To hear their talk, you’d think that rights were handed to each and every one of them when they were born.’
Someone shrieked, and then a smoking body landed before them with a thud against the cobbles with a thud. More people began to rain down; crack crack crack went the splintering of their legs.
Swan hopped back as a skull spattered its contents out across the street. She stared at the gory mess in fascination.
A baby was crying close by. She spotted it amongst the moving bodies, still wrapped in the arms of its broken mother. For all she knew, it was the same infant she’d seen in the room at the very top.
‘Lucky you,’ Swan said to it as she bent down for a closer inspection. To her brother: ‘They cry so quietly, these children of theirs. Have you noticed?’
‘No,’ he replied amidst the screams and the roaring of the flames. ‘Let’s go.’
She nodded, then left it there bawling; someone else’s problem.
Pedero glanced behind him as he knocked on the heavy door of tiq. His hand was shaking as it fell to his side, and he felt the wetness of his armpits where they had bloomed as stains against his priestly white robes.
In his belly lay a sense of dread so intense he thought he might throw up from it.
Get a grip on yourself, the spypriest commanded, and took a deep breath, and exhaled, and clenched his fists tightly.
He was admitted into the room by an Acolyte in plain clothing. The man frisked him roughly, his gaze sweeping over Pedero’s appearance in displeasure. ‘Wait here,’ he instructed, then walked the length of the large room to where a wooden stall was fitted against the far wall; a house-slave stood next to the open doorway of the stall with a bowl of sponges in his hand.
Pedero tried to calm himself as he waited in front of the heavy desk. The rest of the space was crammed with various boxes of files still waiting to be unpacked, much like his own office in the other wing of the building, following the yearly move of the Élash order to its new anonymous premises. A half-eaten breakfast lay amongst the documents on his superior’s desk. Through a doorway behind the desk, he noticed the heavy travelling chest on the floor of the other room, sealed tight by a leather latch and a wrapping of hairy rope.
‘Make it quick!’ came Alarum’s rough voice from his personal privy. ‘I must leave soon for the harbour.’
Pedero’s head jerked around at the spymaster’s sudden announcement. ‘I have a report for you, sir. I think – I think it best that you read it.’
‘Is that you Pedero?’
‘Yes. Yes it’s me.’
‘Well, can’t it wait?’
Pedero looked down at the report he clutched in his trembling hand. The ink of the small, neat handwriting had smudged in places from the sweat of his fingers. ‘I don’t believe so. It’s from one of our listening posts. Concerning a Diplomat by the name of Ché. I un
derstand he’s accompanying the Holy Matriarch on her campaign.’
A hand emerged from the open doorway.
Pedero sidestepped towards it, stuffed the document into the waiting hand without looking. He bowed his head as he stepped back to a respectable distance, clasping his own hands behind his back.
After some moments: ‘He said this? To his damned house-slave?’
‘Yes, sir.’
A mumble of oaths ensued. Alarum wasn’t normally a bad-tempered man. Since declaring that he was to accompany the Holy Matriarch as her personal intelligence adviser, though, he’d been waspish with everyone around him.
‘The time stamp is dated for last night. Why am I only hearing of this now?’
Pedero coughed for air. ‘There was some confusion,’ he began, wincing, ‘concerning the paperwork.’
‘You mean it’s been sitting on your desk all this time, and you didn’t bother to read it until several moments ago.’
He couldn’t deny it. He’d already tried to think of a way that he might push the blame of his own error downwards, but his mind had been gripped by a greater terror just then – sitting there behind his desk with the report trembling in his hand, his mind in a panic at what it had just read, appalled by the knowledge that he was now infected by it, that he couldn’t very well unread the words and therefore be spared the fate most likely promised by them. Tear the bastard thing to pieces and burn them, his thoughts had jabbered in a dizzying moment of hysteria. He’d even stood and turned to the door with that very intention in mind, when he’d noticed Curzon perched behind his own desk across the room from him, peering down his nose above his spectacles; teller of everyone’s tales.
Do your job, Pedero had numbly decided in the chill loneliness of the moment. Brazen it out like you always do.
A moment of madness, he now considered, standing there in the reality of his decision. Pedero lifted his head high as though offering his throat for sacrifice. ‘I’m afraid so, spymaster. With the move, you see . . . we’re still getting back on our feet.’
‘Excuses Pedero? I should have you sent to the pain block for a week for this, and you should thank me for being so lenient.’
‘Yes spymaster.’
A long and weary sigh. It was hardly the most reassuring of sounds from this man.
‘Tell me. How many hands has this report passed through?’
With those words the blood drained from his face. He could feel it, the sudden coldness of his flesh; like he was dead already. He looked to the Acolyte and the house-slave, but they were avoiding his eye.
‘The listener. And myself.’
‘The listener’s name? I can’t make it out here.’
‘Ul Mecharo.’
‘And the slave woman?’
‘Her number is on the report. Top left.’
‘I see it.’
Pedero heard something strange from the stall. He realized it was Alarum clacking his teeth together, a habit his superior tended to exhibit when trying to coerce some detail from his memory.
‘I know this young man,’ he mused through the wall of the stall. ‘Or at least I used to know his mother, when I was young. She was a Sentiate back then, still is, I think. Not one of these dead-eyed girls you get now either. No, full of fire and claws this one. Had to stop seeing her after she fell pregnant, though. Couldn’t stand the taste of her . . .’
‘It does put a rather strong question mark over this Diplomat’s state of mind,’ Pedero tried. ‘He signs his death warrant with such talk, once the Section receives the report.’
‘I rather suspect, Pedero, that his death warrant was signed the moment the details of his mission were first disclosed to him. He knows too much now. We must assume the Section will have him killed as soon as his mission is completed, one way or the other.’
Pedero bit his lip, wondering how to press the spymaster further. He had known the man for several years now. Alarum had always demanded frank discussions with his staff, most of all by his own sometimes brutal candour; he considered it a necessary requirement of their job if one was to remain in anyway level headed.
Pedero glanced to the Acolyte and then to the slave, but both seemed to spend their lives here staring unfocused at the floor. He took a step closer to the stall again, almost pressing against it. ‘Is it true?’ he asked his superior, his voice nearly a whisper. ‘What he said, I mean?’
Alarum’s response came loud and sudden. ‘Leave us,’ he commanded, and at last the Acolyte and slave looked at Pedero, then both headed for the door.
‘You would really wish to know, if it were?’ asked Alarum when they had left.
‘I rather have the feeling a noose is around my neck anyway.’
‘Oh? Then what of me? Haven’t I now laid eyes on this report also?’
‘You may be part of it already,’ said Pedero, bravely. He knew it was long past the point for caution.
A soft wheeze came from the stall. Pedero decided that it was laughter.
Why is he laughing? What is it in the smallest of ways that could be funny about any of this?
‘My superiors, perhaps,’ came his voice at last. ‘This Diplomat’s handlers within the Section, certainly.’
Pedero dabbed his moist lips. He had stopped breathing, it seemed. Just then he found himself thinking of the brick of hazii weed that awaited him in his private chambers back in the Temple District, and the long evening of pleasure he had promised himself with his newly acquired body-slave. He wondered if he would even make it home alive.
It was a hard stare he gave as the document glided through the stall’s doorway and came to rest on the floor.
‘Bury this in the files somewhere. Say nothing of it to anyone. Is that clear?’
He could have thrown himself at the Alarum’s feet, so grateful he felt in that moment. The relief that flooded him was like a flush of sexual pleasure.
‘Of course, spymaster,’ Pedero replied as he hurriedly bent and scooped the sheet of paper from the floor.
‘And – Pedero?’
Breathlessly: ‘Yes spymaster?’
‘What does this Diplomat look like?’
‘I believe his description is in his file.’
‘Bring it to me.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Assassin
Ash failed to notice the batwings flying towards him at first, for they were mere specks in the distant haze above the city.
He was working through a series of stretching exercises beneath the warming morning sky, loosening his muscles and easing the aches of his knees and back in preparation for what was to come, for he knew, deep in his guts, that today she would be coming out from her high raven’s nest at long last.
His attention was wholly focused on his movements, and on the sound of his own deep from-the-belly breathing. Ash was paying little mind to the sky, never mind to the noisy streets below him, even though they were thronged with people in their thousands. The early light seemed harsh to his eyes, the onset of another headache, he knew. He hoped it would not be a major one.
It was when he squatted down to stretch his ham and back muscles that at last he spotted them, a formation of batwings gliding low over the rooftops towards the Temple District, ranged across half a laq. He stayed low as one of them soared directly overhead, so close that he caught a glimpse of the rider slung underneath the wing and heard the rattle of metal and harnesses before it was past. It left a little stirring of air that narrowed his eyes.
Ash caught a flash of white in the edge of his vision, off to the left where a building rose opposite the western side of the playhouse. He ducked even lower, and sidestepped across until he was pressed against the parapet for cover. He raised his head slowly and ventured a look.
An Acolyte was moving on the far building, a longrifle perched over his shoulder as he strolled around the rooftop, occasionally stopping to look down on the streets below. Ash turned around, surveying the other nearby roofs on the other side of the playhouse. On
many of them, those which were flat, he saw white-robes emerging into the daylight.
Before him, the door began to squeal open.
Ash froze on the spot.
The door of the playhouse roof was located in the great concrete hand that stood at its centre, and on the far side from where he was squatting. Ash glanced to the base of the hand, where his spare cloak lay wrapped around his weapons.
An Acolyte stepped out into view from behind the hand. His back was to Ash, and he held a longrifle fitted with an eyeglass in one hand, and a pistol in the other. The white-robe shifted his balance as though to turn around.
Ash acted without thinking by flinging himself over the parapet.
A moment of vertigo passed through him as he hung by his fingertips from the side of the building. His legs dangled into space above the much lower roofs of the original playhouse below, and the thousands of heads bobbing through the streets. The sounds of the crowds were loud in his ears now, like an ocean removed of all sense of harmony, ragged and crashing against itself.
What am I doing down here? he wondered, as he gripped with all his strength the rough concrete edge of the parapet.
A scrape of feet sounded overhead. He looked up to see the Acolyte looking down at him, only his eyes visible through the mask. A breeze tugged at the edges of the figure’s cloak; its curious patterns of silk glimmered in the daylight. In his mind, Ash saw the pyre burning again, and the white-robed Acolytes gathered around it, watching Nico burn.
‘Give me a hand there,’ Ash said to the man in Trade, and released the precious grip of his left hand to hold it out for him. It was not a request, but a command.
The Acolyte shifted uncertainly. His eyes darted to the offered hand. Ash could feel the fingers of his other hand starting to burn, knew that soon they would go numb altogether. He thrust his free hand once more towards the Acolyte.
‘Quickly there!’
The man laid his rifle down, though he held the pistol steady as he reached for Ash’s grasp. Ash pretended he was unable to reach any further with his hand. The Acolyte leaned out to grab it.
Their hands met and clasped together. With a grunt, Ash heaved with all the strength in his arm and pulled the Acolyte forwards, off balance, so that the man toppled over the parapet and fell.