Wystan looks up as I enter the room. We do this every day. I give him a break from his steadfast vigil.
"All right?" he asks, nodding to my sleek metal chair.
"I'm all right. Were you reading to him?"
"A bedtime story."
"About people at bedtime?"
He sniggers, and switches off his data-slate. "The boy doesn't care what I read."
"And if he does?"
"It's educational."
"Go for a walk," I tell him. "Take a nap."
Wystan nods and leaves the room. The scent of his last lho-stick lingers after him.
I bring my chair to a halt at the side of Zael's cot. His flesh is pale, his eyelids dark and sunken. He has been away a long time.
Zael, I begin. Zael, it's me, Ravenor. Just checking in. Are you well?
No response. Not even a flutter of muffled sentience. We've done this every day, so many times now.
If you can hear me, here's how things are. We won. On Eustis Majoris, we won. It was a hard fight, and the battle was costly, but we won. It was my old, old nemesis, Zygmunt Molotch, Zael. Dead twice at my hands, so I believed. He has a habit of coming back. He had taken the identity of the Lord Subsector, and was intent on using the arcane geography of Petropolis to reawaken an ancient language.
I imagine Zael chuckling, and looking confused. Even as I explain it, I realise it's such an odd story.
Enuncia, Zael. A primaeval language that grants the speaker the power of creation, the power to speak a word, and have that word make or destroy. He'd been years planning it. The city was the mechanism to bring it to life. And we stopped him. That's good. Thousands of people died, but that's preferable to billions. We couldn't have allowed him to walk free, empowered like a god.
I turn my chair slightly, kill the field, and drop onto the struts. The hooves of the struts sink into the carpet.
The bad part is, Molotch escaped. Hurt but alive, and in company with several dangerous individuals. Chief amongst them is a cult facilitator named Orfeo Culzean. Culzean is enormously pernicious. So is Molotch. Together...
Zael does not move. He does not react in any way. He sleeps like death is his sleep.
It's my duty to find them, to hunt down Molotch before he can regroup and try another scheme. That's the way he works, you see. Long term plans. He doesn't think twice about embarking on a scheme that might take years, decades, to reach fruition. This I know about him. I've been sparring with him for more than seventy years. I dearly wish he'd stay dead.
There was a school, Zael, an academy: private, esoteric, long since closed down. It existed about a century ago. It was run by a renegade called Lilean Chase, now long dead. Its aim was to develop, by means psychic, eugenic and noetic, a generation of people who would work to further the cause of Chaos in this sector. Every one of them was a genius, a devil, a monster. They, and their handiwork, have plagued the Inquisition for decades. A secret society. A weapons-grade secret society. Molotch was one of the academy's graduates, one of Chase's star pupils. His intellect was astonishing, and it was tempered with extraordinary noetic training. Zygmunt Molotch, you see, is one of the Inquisition's most wanted. He is abominably malicious. He is Cognitae.
So, that's why I'm chasing him. It's not enough we thwarted him on Eustis Majoris. He's still alive, and we have to track him down and finish him before he can rise again. Nothing in my career is more important or vital than this. Not the Gomek Violation, or even the Cervan-Holman Affair on Sarum which, incidentally, I'm sure Molotch had a hand in. Tracking and executing Zygmunt Molotch is the single most important thing I can ever do with my curious life.
I regarded his so-innocently sleeping form.
Zael Sleet. Or is that Slyte?
The single most important thing, I hope. Anyway, we're close. I think we have him. He's here. By which I mean he's where we are. Tancred. One jump stop down from your homeworld, Eustis Majoris. The trouble is, the Ordos want to reel me back in. I left Eustis Majoris in a mess. They want a report, and my explanation. They won't wait any longer. I risk losing my warrant and being denounced as a rogue element.
I don't like it, Zael, but I have to stop and answer to my masters. I just hope I can find and finish Molotch before they take away my rosette.
I pause.
Well, that's me. How are you? Zael?
He doesn't respond. I don't expect him to. I hear the door open behind me and presume it's Wystan.
It's not. It's Carl.
"The envoys have arrived," he says.
+Have they? Very well. I'll be down directly.+
Zael sleeps on, unperturbed.
I engage my chair's lift field, turn, and follow Carl out of the room.
To face, as they say, the music.
PART ONE
A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
ONE
It took a certain sort of man to perform eight ritual killings in three hours, and he was, without doubt, that sort of man.
Each killing was random, opportunistic, each one carried out with wildly different methods and weapons. The first, with a purloined knife, looked like a back street mugging. The second, a strangulation, was made to seem like a sex crime. The third and fourth, together, would later appear to be a drunken argument over cards that ended with both parties shooting one another simultaneously. The fifth, a poisoning, would have any medicae examiner blaming poorly preserved shellfish. The sixth and seventh, also simultaneous, were electrocutions, and made faulty hab wiring seem responsible. The eighth, the most grisly, was staged to resemble a robbery gone wrong.
She finally caught up with him during the eighth murder. A local moneylender, and part-time fence, owned a house on the lower pavements behind the Basillica Mechanicus. He had slipped in through the back kitchen, found the moneylender alone in a shuttered study, and bludgeoned him to death with a votive statue of Saint Kiodrus.
Then he'd removed some paper money orders and gold bars from the moneylender's floor safe to cement the notion of a robbery.
"What are you doing?" she asked, cautiously entering the gloomy room behind him. The rank, metallic stink of blood choked the close air.
Bent over the body, he glanced at her. "What needs to be done."
He reached down and did something to the bloodstained corpse.
"You don't need that," he added.
She kept the snub-nosed Hostec 5 aimed at the back of his head. "I'll be the judge of what I need," she replied.
"Really, you don't need that," he repeated, using the tone of command this time.
She lowered her aim, but she was strong and well trained. She didn't put the gun away.
"This is madness," she said. "You were told to stay in the exclave. Secrecy is paramount. To walk abroad invites discovery. And this... this killing..."
Her voice caught on the word. Leyla Slade was not a squeamish woman. She'd done her fair share of killing, but it had always been professional work. She'd never killed for pleasure, or to appease some mental deviation.
She was disappointed with him, he could tell. He didn't really care, because Leyla Slade wasn't very important in the grand sweep of things. But, for the moment, there were good reasons for keeping her on his side. She was one of his few friends in the cosmos. He could see the disgust on her face, as if she was being asked to babysit some sociopath. She didn't understand. He decided it was time she did.
If nothing else, he didn't like the idea that she considered him to be a homicidal pervert.
"You think I'm killing for kicks?" he asked.
Leyla shrugged. "It looks like what it looks like. I don't care what kind of animal you are. I just get paid to mind you. In this case, that means dragging your psycho arse back to the exclave."
He rose to his feet, facing her. The body on the floor lay in an undignified heap, one slipper off, one stockinged toe turned at right angles. The clothes had been ruffled and disarrayed by the fury of the attack. The votive statue of Saint Ki
odrus had made a pink pulp of the moneylender's face.
"And if I don't want to go back to the exclave?" he asked.
"Well, I'm not sure I can force you. I have no doubt of your abilities. At the very least, though, we'll hurt each other. A lot."
He nodded, and smiled. The smile was genuine. "Yes, I believe we would. I like you because you're honest about these things. We would hurt each other. Let's not."
"Let's not. Agreed. Now, are you coming back?"
"Soon. Let's talk first, Leyla."
She raised the gun. "No. No negotiation. We're going back."
He nodded, half turned, and made some kind of quick, flicking gesture with his right arm. She flinched, felt a slight impact against her wrist, and then the Hostec 5 was in his right hand.
He aimed it at her. He expected anger, dismay, perhaps even a futile attempt to retake possession of the weapon.
Instead she said, "Teach me to do that."
They cleaned the moneylender's house of incriminating traces, and left the victim on the floor of his study, beside the open floor safe. He stood patiently while she dabbed the specks of impact-spatter blood from his face and neck with a wet cloth. His clothes were black, and the rest wouldn't show.
"A robber would set a fire to cover the body, if a burglary had gone wrong," she suggested. "Oh..."
He had already overturned a lamp bowl, and small, blue flames were dancing along the edge of the rug.
Five streets from the moneylender's hab, they entered a small eating house, and took a table at the back. Leyla selected the place because of the low light levels and the fact they could sit away from the street. She ordered a pitcher of petal water, sweetmeats, a cauldro of lemon and tchail rice, and a carafe of the local red wine.
"This is nice," he said.
"It's not. You still have my gun."
He displayed his hands, open. They were very pale, very expressive.
She frowned, reached inside her jacket, and found her Hostec 5 secure in its rig.
"You can teach me how to do that, too."
"If you like. Are you eager to learn?"
"Some things. I have skills, and they earn me a market price. My skills are good enough to please my master. And he teaches me some of his skills too."
"I'm sure he does."
"But a girl always wants to learn new things. From a man like you-"
"Like me? My dear Leyla, not so many minutes past, you characterised me as a deviant killer. A psycho."
She shrugged. "With skills," she said.
He laughed. She was a piece of work. When the time came, he might even spare her. Or at least, kill her mercifully.
The food arrived. The waitress gave them no more than a passing look. A couple, taking a late lunch. An off-worlder girl, tall, built like a swimmer, with short fair hair and a hard, unforgiving face and what? Her lover? Her employer? A slender man, dignified, dressed in black, with a hairless face that, though handsome, seemed uncomfortably asymmetrical.
Leyla picked at the rice. "You wanted to talk."
He poured some wine. "Six months since we left Eustis Majoris," he said. "All that while, you've sheltered me. Kept me hidden, in your custody."
"For safety."
"I understand. I appreciate that. I also appreciate, if I haven't told you, the efforts you and the others have made to secure my safety."
"It doesn't look that way. The first opportunity you get, you slip away from us, and go off into a strange city, killing."
"There's that," he nodded.
"So?" She had no desire to tell him the truth. No need to let him in on the fact that her master had told her to allow his escape, and to monitor it.
"Our principal is getting stir crazy, Ley," Orfeo Culzean had said. "He's kicking his heels, pacing the cage. Let him out for a while. Let him think he's given us the slip. Give him his head for an hour or two, but tail him and bring him back before he, oh, I don't know, tries to undermine the planetary government or something."
Leyla Slade had laughed. "I'll watch him," she'd promised. "If all he wants is a bit of fresh air..."
Molotch took a finger pinch of rice, added a sweetmeat, and slid the load into his mouth. He munched and then washed it down with a sip of petal water.
"I needed to get out," he said. "I have been handled for too long. By you, and, before that, by my Secretists at Petropolis. My life has been lived according to the timetables of others. I needed to walk, free."
"If you'd asked, it could have been arranged."
"If it had been arranged, then it wouldn't have been freedom, would it?"
"Point," she conceded.
He sat back. "On Eustis Majoris, Leyla, I came so close. I came so close to doing something extraordinary, something that would have changed the Imperium forever. Ended it, probably. But I was thwarted, and I failed, and you and your master were on hand to pull me out of the fire and bundle me away. Now, your master and I work on new schemes."
"But?"
"Do you know who I serve, Leyla?"
"Yourself? The deep-time plans of the Cognitae?"
"Yes, and before all of those things?"
She shrugged.
"I won't speak their names aloud, or all the food in this emporium will spoil and all the wine turn to vinegar. They are Ruinous Powers."
"I understand."
"Good. So, you see, I had to give thanks. Though my mission to Eustis Majoris failed, I escaped with my life, to continue my work. I had to give thanks for that."
"Orfeo would-"
"Dear Orfeo doesn't really understand. I don't know what he tells you he is, Leyla, but he's a mercenary. A prostitute. Brilliant, skilled, talented... but he works for money. I don't do what I do for money, or even power, as power is understood by the grandees of this Imperium of Man. I am, I suppose, a man of quite strong religious beliefs."
"You needed to give thanks?" she asked, drinking a sip of water.
"To the old gods I serve. I had to make appeasement, benediction. I had to make a sacrifice of thanks for deliverance, even though that meant risking discovery. A sacrifice must honour the eight, for eight is the symbol, eight-pointed. A common follower might have killed eight at the eighth house on the eighth street in the eighth enclave, at eight in the evening, but I eschew such crudity. The agents of the Throne would have recognised the occult significance in a moment. Even they are not that stupid. So I made eight subtle sacrifices that, according to inspection, would seem random and unconnected."
"But they still had ritual purpose?"
He nodded. He ate some more, and drank some wine. She refilled his glass. "The beggar in the alley I made eight incisions with a knife that weighed eight ounces. I did this at eight minutes to the hour. The housemaid had eight moles on her left thigh, and took eight minutes to suffocate. I was very particular. The gamblers both held double eights in their hands, and eight shots were discharged. And so on. The moneylender, killed at eight minutes past the hour, was slain with eight primary blows, no more, no less, and had been busy accounting the books for the eighth trading month. I anointed all the bodies with certain marks and runes, all made in water now long evaporated. It was ritual, Leyla. It was worship. It was not the act of a psychopath."
"I see that now," she said.
He felt her remark was perhaps sardonic. He half-smiled anyway and drank some water.
"Such an extraordinary level of detail," she added, scooping up more rice. "To plan it like that..."
"I was taught to improvise. Leyla, I don't mean to be rude, but I don't think like you think. My mind doesn't work like yours does."
"Really?"
"I was trained from birth to utilise the full dynamic of my mind. Trained in noetic techniques that give me an edge. More than an edge. What would take another man a week to plan, I can do in a moment."
"Really?" she repeated.
He enjoyed the hauteur in her voice. The scorn. She was tolerating him.
"Really. Leyla, I'm not boasting
or showing off. This is what the Cognitae does to a mind. Acute observation, for a start. The ability to read low-level, passive body language. The ability to notice and compare. To analyse. To predict."
"Prove it."
He lifted his glass and smiled. "Where would you like me to start?" he asked.
"Oh, you go right ahead."
"How many buttons did the waitress have on her bodice?"
Leyla hunched her shoulders. "Six."
"Six. Correct. Good. How many were undone?"
"Two," she said.
"Well noticed. The top two?"
"No, the top one and the bottom one. Her hips were wide."
"Again, excellent. Are you sure you haven't had Cognitae training, Leyla?"
She snorted. "All you've proved is we both like to look at pretty girls."
"Dressed in?"
"What?"
"Dressed in?"
"A bodice?"
"The silk from?"
"Hesperus."
"Good, but no. Sameter. The weave is tighter, and there is a rumpled quality, a Touching, to Sameter silk. And the buttons were made on Gudrun."
"Really?"
"They were gold, and had a hallmark. As she leaned over..."
Leyla put down her glass. "You're making this up."
"Am I? The man at the booth next to us. We passed him on the way in. Rogue trader, armed. Where was his concealed weapon?"
"Left armpit. I saw the bulge. Got a blade in his right boot too, under the hem of the trouser."
"You are sharp."
"It's my business to know."
"Was his moustache longer on the left or right?"
"I... why does that matter?"
"Shorter on the right, because he smokes an obscura pipe, and the hairs don't grow so fast on the side he sucks the mouthpiece. You could see it in his mannerisms, with the lho-stick. A habitual rise and draw. Which means?"