I wondered then, as I wonder now, if the thought-form hadn’t brought the storm with it.
I clung to a broken spar of side post and hoped the wind would not pluck me out of the attic and cast me away over the city like a piece of slate. The rain was in my face, and the wind was pulling my hair. I screamed Judika’s name. I screamed out Sister Tharpe’s name too.
She fled back along the attic, dodging between beams and under rafters as they were wrenched away. The pitched roof drew aside, like a blanket or ground sheet lifted up and shaken so as to find a mouse beneath it. The further she ran, the further the roof peeled back to expose her, denying her even the slightest refuge or shelter. Purlins and beams that had been in place for many centuries tumbled away into the sky like matchsticks.
She was brave. In the face of the bloodshot thought-form thing, she was very brave indeed. The possibilities of flight exhausted, she turned to meet her nemesis. She deployed her formidable telekinetics against it. The concussion of their minds knocked me down and clouted my ears. Several old chimney stacks and part of an outside wall perished, dumping tonnes of friable stone and brick down through the Maze Undue, through lower roofs, through corridors and rooms.
Something grabbed me. I looked around, prepared to fight almost anything off, but saw Mentor Saur. He had a gun in one hand, a large laspistol, and his other hand had clamped me by the arm. He had a look on his face that one might expect to see worn at a funeral or a deathbed vigil.
‘Get below!’ he yelled at me over the wind and rain and the sounds of the building’s fabric shredding.
‘Something must be done, mentor!’ I cried.
‘It is being done,’ he yelled back, shoving me towards the attic steps. ‘Hajara.’
For all I would obey him, obey his words and his urgings, I baulked and looked back in surprise.
‘Hajara!’ he repeated.
A code word, one of the school’s simple, key commands.
‘Surely, even for this–’ I started to say.
‘Not for this, for them,’ he said.
Mentor Saur shook me and turned me to look at the sky. Lights were approaching out of the storm. They looked like blue-white stars, rolling down the slope of the sky towards us, but I realised they were the powerful sweep lights of flying machines. Black shapes, like carrion birds, were wheeling through the rain towards the high house. I could already hear the coarse song of their lifter engines.
‘A raid?’ I asked. ‘That woman was just the scout? Who are our enemies that we–’
‘Go, you little idiot!’ Saur bellowed at me. ‘Hajara!’
I ran down the steps, down the old wooden stairs, into the trembling house. Wind and rain followed me. The wind was slamming at every shutter and window, and the Maze Undue was shaking from the tumult of the conflict under way above. I was shaking. If the Maze Undue had not been in violent tremor, I would nevertheless have been unable to hold my hands steady.
I had forgotten my hurts and pains, my minor injuries. All was eclipsed by the shock of the terrible thing that was happening to us, to the school, to our home.
Hajara. An antique word saved from the old desert languages of Terra. Dissolution. Flight. Dispersal. The scattering of a community. We had been trained in the understanding that if the order were ever given, we would know precisely what to do without any further instruction, and never question the command.
We had been raised in the expectation that it would never have to be given.
I ran down, down towards my room, and took from the hook on the back of the door a leather satchel that hung there, a bag pre-packed with essentials, and always ready. There was no time to look around or say goodbye, no time to even consider taking other possessions.
I emerged from my room, and met Faria coming from hers. She had her own satchel. She was clenching her jaw to fight back the tears in her eyes. She looked at me. We embraced quickly, then she turned and started to run without looking back.
I moved my own way. I had decided to descend and take the west door out through the skirts into Highgate. I passed two of the youngest children on the stairs. They were so intent on flight they did not even once look at me.
From above came more crashes and loud noises. Outside, the roar of the flying machines closing in exceeded the raging gale. Sweep lights flashed along the landing, peering in through old windows with blinding beams. I ran the length of the landing anyway, daring the lights to find me.
One of the landing’s five large windows exploded in at me. Pieces of glass flew, pieces of frame. I jumped back and shielded my face. Something had struck the window outside and smashed it in out of its old frame.
I looked out, into the wind, into the rain.
Directly below me, Sister Tharpe clung to the fractured sill. Some force I could barely imagine had thrown her off the rooftop, but she had struck the side of the building on the way down, and arrested her plunge. I saw how she had done it. Her right hand was clamped around one of her silver pins, which was stabbed into the wooden sill like a climbing spike.
She was cut and bleeding. Her hair was plastered to her face by the rain, and by blood. Her clothing was torn. She clung on by her hands and, perhaps, by the force of her mind, but her feet were swinging above a sheer drop of ten storeys down into the lower, jumbled skirts of the school building. The rain-flecked night yawned below her, and fragments of debris, glass and wood, from the window she had destroyed, tumbled away past her into the abyss.
She looked up at me. Her eyes were green. She was not afraid, but she was certain of her own predicament.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why have you done this to us? Are you so avowedly our foes?’
‘Help me,’ she gasped.
‘Help you? You have destroyed everything!’ I cried. My anger for her was consuming.
‘It had to be destroyed,’ she struggled. ‘You have no idea. It had to be destroyed.’
Her hands were slipping on the broken, wet wood and the silver pin, which was slightly bent. She was weak and hurt, and the strain was overwhelming. I felt her mind pulling at me, trying to find purchase, trying to take hold of my hands and forearms.
I took hold of my cuff and switched it dead.
A flicker of surprise crossed her face. Her grip was gone. All the force of her mind was sapped, and only her fingertips arrested her descent.
It was not enough.
She fell away, backwards, into the blackness and the rain, her arms and legs flailing.
The drop was very far. I did not see her land, nor did I want to.
CHAPTER 12
Undue undone
I took the silver pin out of the wood. It was a serviceable weapon where no others were available. I descended into the skirts of the Maze Undue, throwing myself down one dark staircase after another. Through open doors, I saw furniture knocked over and possessions left behind by other members of the school on their evacuation.
The engines of the circling flying machines made the loudest sounds of all. Sweep lights stabbed in at windows as they passed. I was certain that these were gunship fliers, military craft hired or stolen for the purpose. There was such single-minded malevolence behind this attack. Would the gunships shortly commence firing on the school? Would they demolish the place, stone by stone, with their radial guns and cannon batteries?
I heard other sounds. The battering and stoving in of doors, the kicking of shutters. Men – the agents of our faceless enemy – were storming the school. Perhaps this was to my advantage, I thought. The gunships would not risk firing on a structure occupied by its allies. Men I could deal with. Gunships I could not.
I thought of the woman I had killed, or at least consigned to a certain death. It gave me pause, but I did not feel sick over it. They had made themselves our enemies, and they had revealed their animus. War had been declared, and we were just defending ourselves, in the name of the Emperor who is our guide and master.
In the name of the Holy Inquisition, we had unimpeachable jus
tification for our actions. What justification did these heretics have for theirs?
I swung my satchel over my shoulder, and made for the west door. Roud appeared, out of nowhere. He had his satchel, and also a gun, which he had procured from I don’t know where. Young, frightened, he aimed it at me until he saw who I was.
‘Hajara,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘They are devils,’ he said, ‘and they are everywhere.’
‘Just get out,’ I told him. ‘You don’t need the gun. Just get out. Go to ground.’
Roud was gangly, in the midst of a major growth spurt, and his skin was poor. He looked like a youth waving a toy gun, except the gun was real.
A door behind him was flung open. It was all but taken off its hinges by the manual ram tool that had splintered the lock. Two men came in, one of them casting aside the hefty ram bar. They were dressed in dark clothes, and were wet with rain. They had dark glasses with small round lenses, and ballistic jack shirts.
‘Lie down on the floor!’ one shouted.
Roud shot him.
Roud was a good shot. It was an area in which he was fast excelling. He put four rounds into the face and neck of the man who had issued the order, and sent him slamming back into the kicked-open doors. The man’s round dark glasses, the lenses smashed, flew into the air as he fell.
The other man drew a laspistol. He started yelling commands into a vox headset, and fired at us.
A las-round blew apart the door jamb beside me, making me yelp and flinch. I looked at Roud. He seemed very calm.
‘Please run, Beta,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Run the other way.’
Two more shots came at us. Roud turned back to return fire. Only then did I see the small hole in his back, the size of a fingertip. Smoke curled from it. A las-round had passed clean through him.
He fired at the man who had shot him, sinking very slowly to his knees as he did so.
I ran. There was nothing I could do for him, but there was one last thing he could do for me.
I dodged left, into a sub-hall, and then through the drill into the storage area that adjoined the south door.
But that area had been stormed too. I came up short the moment I saw the big old doors, splintered flat on the floor, where some exterior power had smashed them.
I turned right instead, and made my escape through the cold dank rooms of the old basement kitchens. In doing so, I ran straight into the intruder who had smashed in through the south door.
He was not a man.
He was an it, and it was a box, a great metal box, partly like a throne, and partly like an iron casket. The box hovered above the floor, held up by gravitic mechanisms. It had moved so silently, I had literally run into it and half-fallen across its sloped front.
The metal was warm.
I leapt back, aghast and afraid. I did not know what it was, except that it was another agency of our enemy, and evidently some armoured device for storming a building.
Except, I could feel that it was looking at me. Recessed devices in its bulky armoured integument were perhaps picter lenses or scanning nodes, or perhaps the cones of sensor pods.
And, perhaps, it was more than that. Something more powerful than the most sophisticated human technology.
But if there was any psykana force inside that box, it was helpless. My cuff was dead. My raw pariah field was blunting the world around me.
I would not let this thing take me alive.
CHAPTER 13
Which concerns the search for sanctuary
I stepped back from the coffin-throne. Its systems hummed, keeping its vast weight, improbably, off the stone floor. It had an intimidating presence. It made me think of sarcophagi, of the gilded tomb boxes in which the tribes of the Crimson Desert had once buried their dead chieftains. Mentor Murlees had shown me picts of these venerable objects, recovered by antiquarian explorers from long barrows and cylinder vaults out in the dune ocean. The exteriors of the sarcophagi were fashioned in the likenesses of their occupants: a king famous for his hawk nose, a queen beloved for her heartless smile, a prince renowned for his fierce brow and piercing stare.
The prince in this dull, rusting box had been defaced. There was no exterior likeness, or no face to make a likeness from. He was also crippled, and could not rise to his feet from his throne.
This thought more than any troubled me. I knew of only one mighty lord who could never again rise from his Golden Throne, but whose power Saw All and Was All.
For a moment – I blush to admit it – I actually wondered if this was a visitation, if I had been singled out to bear witness to some prophetic annunciation of the God-Emperor Above Us All. Then, of course, I recognised the foolishness of this imagining, the arrogance of it. I was one of a trillion, trillion, trillion souls within the Imperium of Mankind, and to be singled out was in all ways beyond ridiculous. By no conceivable measure was I of any consequence, not even as a promising pupil in an Ordo training facility. No, the coffin-chair was a mindless instrument for smashing open doors and storming buildings. It was a siege engine for close-combat urban work.
It said something, a blurt of voice noise from hidden speakers. I ignored this. The coffin-throne seemed helpless, and I presumed, gratefully, that its psionic drivers had seized up because of my unlimited blankness. I heard it chatter again, sending and receiving vox-signals. There was someone inside it, a servitor at least. It couldn’t tackle me, but it was reporting my position.
I ran, again, back the way I had come. Our enemies had surveyed the Maze Undue well. They had every opening and exit covered. All the principal ones, anyway. But the Maze Undue, old and rambling, was a maze after all, and only one who had lived within its walls for years, and had explored its extremities with a child’s curiosity, could know all its secret ways.
I ran. Behind me, I heard the ominous coffin-throne purr forwards in pursuit. I turned back through the old basement kitchens, with their dry, lime-scaled sinks and dust-caked work surfaces. Old pots and pans hung from ceiling rails, pots that had never been used in my lifetime.
I did not run all the way back through the kitchens, though. I turned left, into a root store that should have been a dead end. The store had a narrow door, which led to a steep and single descending flight of steps. The coffin-chair simply could not fit to follow me.
Below, in the door-less, window-less store, I pulled aside a heap of mildewed sacking and an old section of panelling, ignoring the wretched soil grubs and beetles I disturbed. Here was a space, a cavity all the youngsters at the Maze Undue eventually learned about if they explored enough. If I bent right down, I could scurry along a little tunnel of dank brick in the dark, pass under part of the south wall, and come out in a section of the skirts we all knew as the stables. There was a street door there, an unremarkable entrance that led down into a corner of Low Highgate Lane. Perhaps this had not been discovered yet.
I was now very low down in the structure of the Maze Undue, deep in its abandoned basements. Still, I could hear, from high above, the whine of the menacing gunships hovering at our eaves, and the thump and crash of intruders. Twice, I heard exchanges of gunfire that made my heart go cold.
Who was fighting? Who was so cornered that they could not simply flee? Who was dying?
The so-called stables were as I remembered them, though I had not been down into their dingy cells for years. We called them the stables for no other reason than in the drab stone chambers there were traces on the walls and floor where wooden partitions, which had divided the place into stalls, had once been fixed. To the walls were screwed iron baskets into which feed could be deposited.
I came through into the grey twilight of the stables in the hope of reaching the lane door, but realised at once that the space could only be a grey twilight if the lane door was already open, allowing light to fall in.
I kept to the walls, my satchel across my back, the bent silver pin in my hand like a knife.
Three men had come
in off the lane, having forced the door. I watched and saw it was in fact two men and a woman. They were dressed like the intruders I had encountered with poor Roud. Their dark clothes were topped with ballistic jack shirts, and they wore round-lensed dark glasses. They carried heavy flash-light instruments, but the devices gave off no luminosity, though they were pointing them into every corner and alcove as they searched. I knew they were mercury vapour lamps, shining with an incandescence beyond the regular visible range. The lenses of their dark glasses allowed them to see whatever their lamps illuminated. The intruders were seeing the world as a cold, electric-blue place.
I had to get past them, all three of them. The lane door was so close. I waited.
One came near, one of the men. I pulled in against a doorway as he came through it, shining his invisible light ahead of him. I held the silver needle down at my side, the spike of it projecting beyond the pad of my palm. With a brisk jerk, I stabbed it into the meat of his thigh at the base of his buttock, below the hem of his body-jack shirt.
He cried out in pain. I felt his blood, hot as caffeine from a stove pot, spurt across my hand as I plucked the needle out. His leg folded under him, requiring him to fall down.
I was already moving, putting my force into a high, rotational kick. Hurt, surprised, and falling over a leg that no longer functioned, he made no defence. My kick connected, turned his face sideways, and cracked his head against the wall behind him. He bounced off this impact and fell flat on his face.
The female was right behind him. I snatched up the mercury vapour lamp the man had dropped, and aimed it in her face. She squealed and leapt back, temporarily blinded. As she reeled, I hit her in the side of the head with the lamp, and put her on the floor.
I wanted to run for the lane door, but the third man was in the passage between me and it. He had heard the commotion, and was turning to charge at me.