‘How so?’
‘I don’t have no friends at all,’ the Curst replied.
He fired. The pistol boomed painfully in the confines of the chamber, and the bullet blew the head off the servitor who was grasping me. Pieces of its shattered cranium bounced off the green velvet wall.
I moved, tearing free from its dead clutches, and barged a second servitor aside with my shoulder. The one that had attempted to inject me rushed at the Curst, and he killed it with two more deafening shots. The bullets went through its torso plating.
Blackwards yelled out a profanity, and raised his hand to despatch the Curst with whatever lethal mechanism lurked in his ring-weapon. I reacted instinctively, because he was within my reach. I smashed the book – which I was still holding – into his hand to dislodge his aim. His shot, a micro-slim beam of plasma, streaked across the room, and burned a hole in the wall. The chamber was suddenly filled with the stench of smouldering velvet.
Blackwards stumbled away, and looked down at the back of his hand in dismay. There was a tiny red weal, like a flea bite, between his knuckles, where the needle transfixing Lilean Chase’s book had punctured his skin.
His mouth moved, chewing the air, but no words came out. His eyes bulged. He gagged, and then he collapsed heavily, overturning the sideboard.
The two servitors still intact faltered, torn between conflicting responses: to follow recent commands and restrain me, or to obey deep-set defaults and see to their master.
As they dawdled, the Curst motioned to me.
‘Past time we found the door out of here,’ he said.
We moved together along the hallway out of the room. Hand bells were ringing all around. We could hear running footsteps and a general commotion. A servitor came out of a side passage in front of us, and the Curst punched it out of our way with the butt of his hefty pistol. Its face broke as it fell down. I paused to hitch up my skirts so I could run more adequately.
‘Did you come in the front or the back?’ I asked.
‘The back,’ he replied. ‘They wouldn’t let the likes of me in the front way.’
‘Then why are we heading towards the front?’
‘The back’s teeming,’ he replied.
Another servitor appeared. The Curst raised his pistol in a two-handed brace and fired off two shots that blew out its head and neck. The cylinder of the revolver carried ten shots of standard ballistic ammo. An eleventh, larger-calibre chamber was centred in the cylinder’s axis, and discharged through the fatter of the gun’s two barrels. For now, the Curst was firing standard ammunition.
We leapt over the fallen servitor, ran through a sales room, and hurried down another passageway towards the front door. This was the door out into Gelder Street.
It was very firmly locked.
Behind us, a large number of servitors had gathered and were advancing on us.
‘Stand back and cover your face,’ said the Curst.
He adjusted his revolver, switching the hammer to the centre chamber, and aimed it at the door.
The Lammark’s centre chamber was a large-capacity slot for a buckshot cartridge or a breaching round. He had loaded the latter. The under-barrel fired with a deeper, more painfully leaden bang than the narrower upper muzzle. The breaching round shredded the entire area around the door handle, mangling the latch and the electrically fired deadbolts.
He kicked the broken door open and we ran outside.
Suddenly, he was walking, stuffing the pistol out of sight under his coat.
‘Walk,’ he said. ‘Walk.’
I fell in step beside him.
Passers-by had retreated from the exploding door, and there was a general commotion and alarm. Servitors spilled out into the street, heads turning, training their audio and optic receptors. A crowd was gathering, drawn by the fuss.
We walked into it, heads high, calm, as though we had nothing to do with anything. The only thing about us a person might comment on was the fact that we weren’t stopping to gawk like everyone else.
The servitors did not pursue us. Bells and whistles told us the city watch was coming. Blackwards did not want to get involved in a public debacle. Its clientele valued discretion and privacy. They were not likely to frequent an establishment where scandal and upset occurred.
We walked down Gelder Street, crossed Pandovar Lane, and then turned into Besk Lane. An iron-barred gate was open into the yard of a laundry, and we stopped there, just inside the wall, where we could not be seen.
I realised I still had the little blue book. I plucked the syringe fitting out of it, and sniffed the tip of the needle.
‘Tincture of Morpheul,’ I said. ‘They were trying to put me to sleep. I am rather glad I did not poison and kill the Blackward.’
‘When he wakes up, he’ll be sore enough,’ said the Curst. ‘You can expect to see him again.’
I tossed the broken syringe aside and tucked the book away.
‘Thank you for your assistance,’ I said.
‘It’s not over,’ he replied. He was carefully reloading his Thousander, which was split open so he could fill the drum with shells from his coat pocket.
‘I have no need of–’
‘I’m to take you to Eusebe. That was what she told me.’
‘Just tell me where she is, and I will go to her,’ I replied, ‘Just–
‘She didn’t tell me whether I should let you know that information or not, so I will take you instead,’ he decided.
‘I insist that–’
‘You’re not obliged to insist. That’s the way it will be.’
‘Will you ever let me finish a single sentence?’ I asked.
He said nothing, which was more annoying.
I turned and walked away. He snapped the pistol closed, tucked it away, and set off after me.
‘Will you stop following me?’ I snapped.
‘I will not.’
‘I have no need of this–’
‘You have it anyway,’ he said. He had caught up with me. He was tall, and even walking, his long stride covered a lot of ground. ‘I have to deliver you to the woman. That’s my burden, and I will carry it out, though you like it or not.’
I stopped and looked at him.
‘Sir, I appreciate the seriousness of a Curst man’s burden,’ I said, ‘but you are becoming a problem to me. Could you tell me where Eusebe is, and then perhaps leave me alone?’
He shook his head.
He did not seem a bad person, but his single-mindedness was frustrating. The Curst, if you do not know, are a very low-caste type of penitent. They are men, or sometimes women, who have committed some great sin. If they choose to face the judgement of the Ecclesiarchy courts, rather than the civil ones, they accept the weight of their crimes, and embark upon a lowly life of atonement as a burdener, or ‘Curst’. This means they must live their lives on the streets, surviving by charity and alms, and doing all they can, for all their lives, to help others. This means serving or assisting others, without question or hesitation. Every action they take to assist another takes a little away from the burden they carry, and so forms part of their atonement.
In extreme cases, this has led to them being almost outside of the law, pariahs in the old sense of the word. The ethical logic runs that the greater the burden of others they can ease, the more their own burdens are reduced, even if the burden of others is a dark one. So, a man might be troubled by a desire to avenge himself on another man. A Curst man, or burdener, would exact that vengeance for him, sparing the man the guilt and crime. The business of the vengeance does not matter to the Curst; what matters is the great moral weight he has spared the other man. This selflessness counts against the equity of his own, original sin.
So the Curst take on the curses and crimes of others, to diminish their own burdens. Often, they will write their own crime, and the crimes they have accepted on behalf of others, on their skins in ink. They absolve the wrongs, the crimes, the evils and the sins of others by taking
them on and carrying them as their own.
In the slums of Queen Mab, the Curst can become, in effect, unpaid mercenaries, for they are willing to do anything for any man; even the worst crime is redemptive for them.
‘I can’t let you be,’ he said, ‘until I have done what I said I would do. That’s just the way of it, whether you like it or not.’
‘So I am to be part of your shriving?’ I asked.
‘That is how it must be.’
I sighed.
‘Then take me to her. But do as I tell you. First, we will go by way of the Cronhour.’
‘We will do no such thing,’ he replied.
‘Yes, we will,’ I said. ‘I am with another person that the lady who sent you will want to see. We must collect him. Be thankful I am cooperating this much.’
He shrugged.
‘What is your name?’ I asked.
‘I told you, I don’t have no name. I am–’
‘Curst. I know. I refuse to call you that. What was your name?’
‘I was Renner Lightburn,’ he replied, ‘a long time ago.’
‘I didn’t think the Curst were supposed to carry weapons, Mr Lightburn,’ I said, ‘especially powerful firearms.’
He shrugged again.
‘I see as how I can do as I like. It won’t make my burden heavier. I can’t be any more cursed.’
I did not find this announcement especially reassuring.
CHAPTER 18
Which is spent travelling back in time
We went to the Cronhour Helican. It was, by then, mid-afternoon. The threat of rain hung over Queen Mab, but the rain itself failed to materialise. The clouds were very dark, and banked steeply like mountainsides, filling the sky. They looked like a city too, a city of towers and walls and high ramparts, shown in silhouette, or a shadow of Queen Mab somehow cast against the backdrop of the sky. I was reminded of the City of Dust, which is a famous myth of the Hercula prefecture. The City of Dust is said to lie out to the north-east, towards the Sunderland, out in the direction of the great emptiness that is the Crimson Desert. It is said that Queen Mab was once one of a pair of cities that stood side by side, and that the City of Dust is all that remains of the missing twin.
I fancied I could see its outline upon the heavens.
We slowed our approach to the Cronhour on the far side of Delgado Square, trying to remain anonymous in the moderate foot traffic of the embassy district. I made us walk past the place one way, and then go back along the other way, without approaching it directly.
‘Stay here,’ I told the man, Lightburn.
‘I don’t believe I shall,’ he returned.
‘For Throne’s sake!’ I snapped. ‘I will not take you into that place. An escort such as you will not fit the role I am playing.’
I gave him a generous handful of change from my purse.
‘Go into the dining house here, sit at a table near the window, and order a pot of caffeine. Watch for me. I will come back.’
The Curst looked dubious, as if this was some means of me giving him the slip. In all honesty, I had considered it, but I was too anxious to make use of his connection to Mam Mordaunt.
I handed him the little blue book I had acquired at Blackwards. It had, in all probability, saved both our lives in inadvertent manners since I had first picked it up. It was not a thing I wanted to lose.
‘This is valuable,’ I told him. ‘I want time to study it later, for I feel it may be useful. Look after it for me while I go to my rooms. It pretty much guarantees I will come back to find you.’
He looked at the book, pursed his lips thoughtfully, and then put it away inside his coat.
‘If you do not show again in an hour,’ he said, ‘I will come in.’
I left him at the dining house and crossed the square. Rain still threatened. I had a key to the night door, but during daylight hours, Laurael Raeside would use the front.
Children had been playing in the street just down from the Cronhour’s gate. They had chalked a pattern on the paving stones to skip across.
Or that’s what anyone passing by would think.
I saw the formation. A basic code, taught to us by Mentor Murlees, giving instruction that a site was not safe, or had been compromised.
Judika had left this warning for me. Our enemies, dogged and persistent, had already traced us to the Cronhour.
I went back to the dining house and found Lightburn.
‘That took no time,’ he said.
‘We’ll be on our way now,’ I said.
This puzzled him. He got up and followed me back onto the street.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
He hesitated.
‘Now we’ve run your errand,’ he replied, ‘we do things my way.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘My friend was not there. He has moved on. We still have to find him.’
Lightburn sighed.
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘A book-binders on Feriko Street, near Toilgate.’
The commandments of Hajara were perfectly straightforward. One retreated to one’s previous role or identity, and if that proved false, then to the one before it. Laurael Raeside was compromised, so I had to fall back promptly to the function I had undertaken before that, and resume that role for as long as it was viable. Judika knew this. I had briefed him on my last few functions, just in case.
I was, however, concerned that we had been discovered so swiftly. I was quite certain we had not been followed back to the Cronhour Helican. It suggested that someone, perhaps someone captured during the raid on the Maze Undue, had given away the likely locations of those fleeing at the Hajara order.
The most alarming part of that was that only a few people knew enough about the functions to have confessed them. Only the mentors knew the function placements of the candidates. I could not imagine any of them, not even Mentor Murlees, breaking down under interrogation. I shuddered to think what techniques must have been used to achieve such a thing.
Before I had been sent out as Laurael Raeside, I had been assigned to function as an assistant at a book-binders on Feriko Street. I had used the name Blide Doran. When we approached the bindery, I saw once again, the innocuous chalk markings of a children’s pavement game outside.
We turned aside.
A step back from Blide Doran was Sero Hanniver, a mamzel’s companion, who had filled a place at the house of the Tevery family for a month. We skirted back that way, along Solarside to the grand residences on Chieros Walk. The rain began to fall at last.
The rain, though brisk, had not quite erased the chalk marks on the wall outside Tevery House.
Lightburn was growing impatient. He did not quite understand what we were doing, or why it should matter. For my part, it felt as though I was travelling backwards through time, fleeing from one past identity to the next, only to have to flee again. I was falling into my own past, reacquainting myself with people I had never expected to be again.
It was highly disconcerting. I was also fearful of the reach of my enemies. Just one day after the vicious attack on us, and they had broken one or more of the mentors, and reached back into our secrets to uncover the circumstances of our past assignments. I tried to remember how far back I had gone when telling Judika about past functions. Three, perhaps, or four? At the time, that had seemed a generous safety margin. Now I was afraid that we would run out, and Judika would have no means of contacting me.
Padua Prate had come before Sero Hanniver. I was fairly sure I had told Judika that much. If Prate, like Laurael Raeside, Blide Doran and Sero Hanniver, was unviable, Judika would not know where to go next.
Lightburn the Curst was becoming truly frustrated.
‘Now where?’ he asked.
‘A commune on Lycans Street, behind the Toilgate almshouses.’
Padua Prate had worked as an artist’s model at the commune for three weeks, while training under the hue-makers to learn the trade of mixing paint pigments. The function had
been arranged in order to watch an artist called Constant Shadrake. Certain symbology had appeared in some of his recent works, and the Secretary’s instruction was to observe him and discover if he had fallen in with heretically minded persons, or acquired some proscribed work that had inspired him. I had found nothing. The symbols proved to be coincidental echoes.
During my time as Padua Prate, I had lived with the other juniors, helpers and models in the commune’s crumbling residence, which was no more than a squat.
The commune had been established in an old plating works on Lycans Street. Six or seven artists had set up their ramshackle studios there, and the area itself was an artistic enclave.
By the time we arrived, it was raining heavily. If there had been chalk marks outside the place, the rain had long since washed them away.
I wavered. I did not want to lose my connection with Judika, and this was the last chance to maintain it.
We went inside.
The place was as I remembered it. On the ground and first floors, large rooms had been converted into rambling studios, with faded drapery hung from the walls and old rolls of carpet, overlaid, upon the floor. Furniture and other props were stacked around, and the carpets were much bespattered with paint. Tables, shelves, chairs and easels were similarly caked in splatterings of the stuff, and the area was piled about with the tools and instruments of the artist’s trade. Windowsills were lined with pots and jars of dirtied water and oil, and boxes filled with rags sat under trays of paint pots, palettes, tincture mixtures and many, many vessels stuffed with brushes. The air was heavy with the stink of mixing oils and other spirit agents, and thick with the pungent scents of the mineral powders being ground and mixed by the hue-makers in the pigment shops upstairs.
No one was at work. It was late afternoon and the light was bad, and in my experience, by this time of day, most of the artists would have retired to the local inns or up to their attic rooms with pouches of lho weed.
Lightburn sniffed dismissively. Paintings, some drying, hung along the walls of the hall and corridors, and none impressed him. There was other work done here: prints, sculpture, miniatures, and some pictographic work, but I didn’t see any point in trying to express this to him. Renner Lightburn evidently saw life in a simple, practical way, a view that allowed no room for art.