“Harl would never do something like that,” Linder said, sounding genuinely angry. Most Administratum adepts would as soon profane the name of the Emperor as knowingly tamper with the data they were charged to protect.
“Don’t you think it a little odd that so many records relating to him have disappeared?” I asked, refusing to raise my voice in return.
Linder looked thoughtful. “That might be the result of tampering,” he conceded. “But you’ve got no proof that Harl’s responsible.”
“Nothing definite,” I agreed. “But innocent men seldom disappear into thin air. Unless foul play’s involved.”
Linder paled; clearly this possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “You think he’s been murdered?” he asked at last.
“It’s possible,” I said evenly, “but I doubt it. I think he wiped his own records to cover his tracks, and hide whatever else he tampered with.”
“Harl wouldn’t do a thing like that,” Linder said again, glaring at me with unmistakable dislike. “And I’ll prove it.”
“I’ll be delighted if you can,” I told him. He clearly knew nothing of any use to me. “In the meantime, if he should get in touch, or you find some trace of him, be sure to let me know.”
“You can count on it,” Linder said, in tones which made it clear he regarded the interview as over.
How much of his interrupted chain of thought Linder was able to pick up after my departure I can only guess, but given his stubborn streak, I imagine he’d pretty much completed his task for the day by the time he left the scriptorium and headed uphive to meet Milena Dravere. He found his way with little trouble, consulting his data-slate from time to time, but generally moving through the shift-change bustle with a resolute determination which left the local operatives I’d assigned to watch him scurrying to keep up; no mean feat, given that most of them were Kannack born and bred. True to the picture I was beginning to form of him, he took little notice of the barrage of noise and spectacle most men would have found distracting, but remained obdurately fixed on his goal.
The only time he showed any visible sign of surprise was when he reached the Via Zoologica itself, and realised that the road broke through into the open air. He paused for a moment, looking down the long, sloping flank of the hive shining like a beached galaxy below, then strode on, his shadow flickering in and out of existence as it merged momentarily with the patches of deeper darkness between the waylights. As he neared his destination, skirting a crowded tavern from which jaunty zither music floated incongruously on the night air, he slowed his pace, paying greater attention to the address plates screwed to the smog-eaten bricks of the overhanging housefronts.
At length he came to his destination, and knocked, a little hesitantly. After a few moments a woman opened the carved wooden door a wary crack.
“Milena?” he asked, unsure of his reception. “It’s me, Zale.”
“Then you’d better come in.” The door opened wider, and he stepped inside, finding himself in an airy, well-lit entrance hall. His hostess was petite, dark-haired, and carried a small-calibre autopistol in her left hand. Linder had never seen a genuine weapon before, and was taken aback; but before he could protest, Milena had closed and bolted the door, and deposited the gun on a nearby occasional table. From the number of faint scratches in the marquetry surface, Linder surmised that the gun generally rested there, where it could be picked up easily whenever the woman answered the door.
She motioned him through one of the arches leading off the hall, and he found himself in a comfortably appointed living room roughly the size of his entire lodgings. He looked around curiously, noting the opulent decor, the artful scattering of antiques and objets d’art, utterly unlike the contents of any room he’d ever been in before.
“You have a very elegant home,” he said, hoping to break the awkward silence.
“Thank you.” Milena perched on the edge of a sofa, opposite the armchair Linder had selected as seeming least likely to swallow him whole. He was astonished at how comfortable it was; the furniture he was used to was generally selected for its utility, rather than comfort. Milena glanced round, as though lost in her own house. “Harl found it for me.”
“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.
&nb
sp; 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.”