The Leach Lane retainers fell back in front of the notorious Tusk Slope chieftain, wailing in alarm and locking their shields. Deathrow didn’t bother with them. He turned aside, his visor optics buzzing loudly. He came towards Judika and me.
I realised he wasn’t making for us at all. The amber cursor of his optic trench was fixed and focused, not upon either me or Judika, but rather on something behind us. I moved aside, shoving Judika with me.
Deathrow engaged the big old ones who had first faced us, and who had come after us when we fled. He clashed with the knife-fisted one first. The impact was like two road vehicles driving into each other head-on. Armour plating buckled and scraped. Augmetic cables and feed tubes tore or split. Fluids, one of them blood, leaked out of seams in their welded bodyplate.
The warblind tried to punch his knife-fist up under Deathrow’s guard, but Deathrow head-butted him savagely to break the tight clench, and eviscerated his opponent with a slash of his broadsword as they parted. The veteran’s entrails spilled out of his ruptured plate, and most of the matter wasn’t organic. Yellow plastic tubes, intestinal augmetics and synthetic processing sacs flopped out like wet rope. The Leach Lane veteran made a subhuman noise through its vox plug, and fell on its back, twitching.
The other, the one with the double-headed axe, put one of those heads into Deathrow as he was occupied, stoving in part of his shoulder guard. Deathrow tilted, planting his feet for a better, braced stance, and led in at the axe-man. One axe-head deflected the first sword stroke, the other put aside the second that Deathrow made. The warblind had a hand gripping each end of the axe haft, near each blade-head, and was switching the weapon like a quarter staff.
Deathrow adjusted, and echoed the style, sweeping in with both the deadly tip and side of his sword blade and, as a counter-stroke, the hefty knob of the pommel. His left hand, steeled and armoured, gripped the end of the sword blade for leverage each time he swung the pommel in, so that he was using his broadsword in a quarter-staff fashion too, as Mentor Saur had taught me was done in the very old days.
They crossed, locked, and cross-struck again, battering each other’s guards to either side with both ends of their weapons. Each blow sounded like someone taking a sledgehammer to the bodywork of a cargo-8.
Judika and I had backed up against the street wall, into the doorway of what once may have been a shrine or temple, before the holloway was blessed and sealed. We were ready to defend ourselves, but the big, ugly cattle dog was taking out the throats of any retainer who ventured to be too brave, and Deathrow’s combat kept the veteran warblind back.
‘We should run,’ Judika stated.
‘To where exactly?’ I replied. ‘There is no way past this.’
‘Why is that one fighting for us?’ Judika asked.
I could not answer. I wasn’t even sure that Deathrow and his dog were fighting for us. The warblind fight. They fight anything. They fight one another. That is their way, and their hideous destiny. It was quite possible that we were merely benefitting from Deathrow’s regular instinct.
The axe-man landed a blow that cracked across the side of Deathrow’s plated skull. Deathrow had evidently had his fill of this battle. He stepped back and rotated his dark sword in a cross-guard stroke. The warblind parried, moving his weapon into a horizontal hold, the haft blocking across his chest. Instead of locking with it again, staff-to-staff as you might say, Deathrow simply heaved an over-arm swing that chopped his blade down the warblind’s centreline. The blow cut through the cross-wise haft, cutting it in two, and continued on to slice down the warblind’s chest.
The old one staggered back a step, blood and hydraulics leaking from his split breastplate. The halved axe dropped from his hands. Deathrow stabbed, thrusting the broadsword tip-first into the veteran’s torso, low down. It went clean through. Deathrow dragged it out – and it came loose with a sucking sound and a welter of blood – and stabbed again, this time driving the sword through the warblind’s cranium. A second time, he wrenched the blade out. The warblind swayed, jerking. Deathrow drove in a third stab, this one through the chest. The tip of the sword came out through the armoured shoulder blade.
I understood these three strikes. The massive axe-man was a heavy-duty augmetic, with hard combat reinforcement. Deathrow had destroyed all three of his power plants: the primary at the base of the spine, the secondary in the skull, and the tertiary cardiac in the thorax. All three hearts were broken.
The old one fell.
The cattle dog was finishing another retainer, shaking the wretch by the throat so hard his legs flew and flopped. We heard the spinal cord crack as it parted. The dog dropped the mauled corpse. Deathrow stepped forwards, swinging his blade across his body in a deft, smooth figure-of-eight. His optics buzzed.
The Leach Lane warblind backed away, mangy retainers and armoured veterans alike.
Deathrow’s optics buzzed again. Some kind of understanding was reached.
The warblind melted away into the shadows and the rain, leaving their dead steaming and twitching in the holloway behind them.
Deathrow turned to look at us. His amber cursor flicked to and fro in his visor slit. It buzzed.
The cattle dog, muzzle black with blood, came to sit at his master’s side. It growled, and for a second, the growl seemed to swell to make the sound ‘Beta’. Again, I say, I would swear this to be the fact of it, though I do not believe in talking dogs.
‘Deathrow,’ I replied. The cattle dog lowered itself and put its chin on its paws, regarding us with beady black eyes.
Deathrow’s optics buzzed. He made a gurgling sound, and then his mouth opened, like a knife-slit in the scar tissue of his face.
‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance this day,’ he said, in a voice made of centuries and anguish.
I bowed slightly to him.
‘Why did you help us?’ I asked.
‘Because I can see you,’ he said.
Then he turned and, with his ugly dog at his side, walked away into the rain.
CHAPTER 16
At Blackwards
Just before noon the following day, I stood outside the Blackwards emporium on Gelder Street and rang the brass bell. I was Laurael Raeside again.
In truth, there were many other things that I would rather have been doing at that moment than spending several more hours in the fusty old establishment, for there were more weighty matters pressing on my mind. But candidates of the Maze Undue are trained well in the art of developing and maintaining seamless identities, and it was vital that the guise of Laurael Raeside remained intact. There was no function to speak of any more, and it seemed positively ridiculous to waste time considering the prospective purchase of artefacts on behalf of a man who didn’t know me and, in a manner of speaking, didn’t exist anyway. However, the standing order Hajara applied. Laurael Raeside was my lifeline and my sanctuary. I had to protect her so that she could protect me.
That meant I had to do what she would do. Mam Mordaunt always taught us that one of the surest ways to detect a guise, or to see behind a person’s mask, was to watch for someone suddenly behaving out of character, or making excuses not to do something expected of them. Laurael Raeside was expected at her appointment that day. She had said she would be there. She could have sent her excuses – an unexpected clash of appointments, a sudden onset of ague or shift sickness, a private matter (I, Beta Bequin, had already dreamed up many for her) – but nevertheless, Laurel Raeside would have broken her promise. She would have behaved out of character.
If anybody was watching her, it would be evidence that she was not what she claimed to be.
I wasn’t sure if anybody was watching us. I didn’t know how thorough or informed our enemies were. The heretic society, whatever Jude chose to call it or not call it, may have been scrupulously well-informed thanks to spies like Sister Tharpe. They may have had likenesses of all the candidates in the Maze Undue, and all the mentors too, and they may have circulated them to their city
watch as persons of interest. Judika and I were fairly sure we weren’t being surveilled, but we were being careful.
I had not slept well, or for as long as I would have wished. Sometimes, great stress and trauma leads to unexpectedly deep and renewing sleep, but this was not one of those times. I was fretful. The fall of the Maze Undue was an almost unbearable thought, and I worried about all my fellow candidates, and about the mentors too. What had their fates been, I wondered? How many of them had escaped to the comparative safety of a function guise?
I thought, too, of the woman, the telekine. I thought of her falling away from me to her death, her face registering surprise, her purchase stolen by my pariah mind. She had been my enemy, and she had initiated the downfall of the Maze Undue.
But it was not a comfortable memory. I had never imagined myself capable of such a callous action.
It would turn out I had not even begun to discover what I was capable of.
Judika and I had reached the Cronhour Helican late, after our travails in the holloways. We rang at the night door, and a bleary porter let us in and showed us to my suite. Outside, though it was not yet light, street-cleaning servitors were out, sweeping and hosing the gutters of the embassy district. The rain had drawn off. The remains of the night were damp and cold, like a body pulled out of a river.
The rooms were fine, elegant. The porter had no reason to believe I hadn’t been living in them for the past few days, as the register said. Judika took a side room, where a footman would sleep, and I occupied the master chamber. I used the line of credit established through a city banking house for Laurael Raeside to contact local businesses and have garments, some medical supplies, and other items couriered to the rooms. We cleaned ourselves up, and patched our injuries. We laid out fresh clothes for the following day: a gown, coat, mantle and hat for me; a gentleman’s dark three-piece, as might suit a very well-to-do valet, for Judika.
‘Do you want me to go with you?’ he asked as he brushed his jacket.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I went alone yesterday, so I can go alone today. There are other things you can do.’
He nodded.
‘Procurement of weapons,’ he said.
I looked at him.
‘I had not thought of that.’
‘Then you should,’ he said. ‘We were found once, we can be found again. I am not entirely confident in the prophylactic qualities of Laurael Raeside.’
I did not rise to this jibe. He was baiting me, suggesting that I was incapable of playing the guise for any sustained time without making a mistake. I knew he was frustrated because circumstances had given me the lead role in this.
I also knew he was tired and hurt. He seemed to have become sharper and more cruel than the boy I remembered being fond of, but fatigue was heavy on us both. He was not well, either. He had developed a slight, but persistent cough, due, I imagined, to inhaling the noisome dust during the fight in the attic. I would hear him in his room later, when we were both trying to sleep, coughing intermittently.
‘Get weapons, then,’ I had said to him. ‘Do you know where to go?’
‘I have contacts,’ he replied. ‘Thaddeus taught me plenty of places in the Queen where a man might avail himself of a sidearm with no questions asked.’
He spoke of Mentor Saur as if he had been an equal, as if the weapons master had trusted him with knowledge unsuitable for the likes of me.
‘Get your weapons, then,’ I said. ‘Find something for me. A snub weapon, preferably las. And a small blade too.’
‘A dagger?’
‘I mean a sword. I have a slipknife.’
‘You have a bent silver pin too,’ he sneered.
‘Either of which I can use to stop you annoying me,’ I replied. ‘A snub pistol and a small sword. A cutro, perhaps. A marginalle. Whatever you can find.’
He nodded.
‘The other considerations are important,’ I said. ‘To make an assessment of our situation. That is first. To transmit a report and a request for assistance to the Ordos, that is second.’
‘Possible,’ he said. ‘I have key codes. It may take a day or two to arrange discreetly. Off-world communication traffic, such as through the Office of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, will be monitored.’
‘Our enemy’s reach is that pernicious?’
‘Let us assume it is and not be disappointed.’
I considered this.
‘We must begin to reach out to the others,’ I said. ‘I know of some, of the functions they were currently engaged in. If they made it out alive, we could find them–’
‘And blow their cover,’ he snapped. ‘You’d do that, would you? Compromise their identities by attempting contact?’
‘I didn’t mean–’
‘You could get them killed. And us.’
‘We need to know, Judika–’
‘We wait to know,’ he replied. ‘We abide by the terms of Hajara, and wait for instruction to come from the mentors.’
‘And if the mentors are dead?’ I asked.
‘We wait,’ he said, emphatically. ‘I have authority here, Beta. I am an interrogator of the Ordos, and I know what’s best.’
I shrugged.
‘Whatever else, it should be a priority to get your cuff repaired.’
He glanced down at it.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It will be tricky. It’s specialised work.’
‘It’s essential, nevertheless. We need to be able to use the holloways, and without a cuff, you can’t. We can’t rely on Deathrow to save us next time.’
‘What was that about?’ he asked, staring at me.
‘I wish I knew. He’s a strange thing, and he’s taken a shine to me.’
‘His brain is fried,’ said Judika. ‘No doubt he’ll kill you next time he claps eyes on you.’
‘Perhaps he will,’ I said.
And so I stood in Gelder Street and rang the brass bell. The window display had changed. The disturbing mannequin twins had taken up their chairs and gone. In their place, a single and rather ancient quarto volume lay open on a satin cushion, a glass weight holding its delicate pages open.
I went to the window and looked in at it, catching sight of my pale reflection and hoping that the carefully applied make-up concealed my bruises effectively.
The book was, by my estimation, about four hundred years old, and presented a history of ‘Sanctus Orphaeus’. The page that it was opened to was part of the section concerning ‘The Eudaemonic War’, which I knew was an old name for the Orphaeonic War, or ‘Old War’ or, merely, ‘the war’ as all in Queen Mab knew it. The text was vividly illuminated. War machines and augmetic berserks stalked and duelled between the columns of elegant script. The capital letters were formed from mythical animals like unicorns and manticores. The berserks, I guessed, were what became the warblind.
There was a small white card placed at the bottom right-hand corner of the display. It read:
A History of Orphaeus and the Eudaemonic Conflict,
publisher unknown, Sancour, 712.M39
Price upon application
I thought for a moment. 712? That was wrong. Almost eighteen hundred years ago? No, a mistake. The war was a thing of history, I knew that. But it had happened a few hundred years before, not eighteen hundred.
‘My dear Mamzel Raeside.’
I turned from my inspection to see Lupan, the shopkeeper, waiting for me at the open door. His appearance was, in all ways, identical to the day before. Everything about him was prim, laundered, starched and ironed. His manners were as poised as the solemn, ornamental servitors who fetched us pots of chocolate and plates of iokum.
He was like a doll, I thought, a well-operated puppet. Once that weird notion had entered my head, I couldn’t banish it.
I understood it was a consequence of the stress. Mam Mordaunt had taught us that trauma often leaves the mind weak, and particularly susceptible to flights of fancy and imagination, which then further weaken it. It is a downward spira
l, and is to be avoided. There were methods. I needed to clear my mind and fortify myself. Sleep would help but, presently, in the Blackwards emporium, that was out of the question. I needed a moment of reflection, of meditation. Lupan was busy around me, eager and attentive, talking about this item and that curiosity at a headlong rate that suggested he was a theatrical dummy like the ones I had viewed in the window the day before, his mouth clacking in time to a voice thrown from off-stage.
‘The book in the window display,’ I said.
‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘the History.’
‘It looks intriguing.’
‘It is very fair work, mamzel,’ he agreed, ‘though I was not aware your employer had a particular interest in books.’
‘In age,’ I said. ‘You pointed out that he is interested in age. The book, I believe is eighteen centuries old.’
‘It is.’
‘Rare for a thing made of paper.’
‘By all means you may look at it,’ he said.
I told him I would. I knew that it would take him some time to fetch it out of the window, and that would allow me a space to sit alone, in the quiet, and clear my head.
He was gone fifteen minutes or more. I unpinned my hat, took off my gloves and mantle, and undid the buttons on my long coat. It was stuffy, but oddly cool in the emporium, the result of various environment systems. I sat upon a high-backed Orphaeonic chair with ball and claw feet, and closed my eyes, slowing my breath rate, and focusing on my tempering litany. During our induction training, all candidates were encouraged to develop one of these. It was simply a mind-tool, a focus mechanism that allowed us to meditate. We each chose a calming memory, perhaps the image of a place from childhood, or the words of a favourite hymn or Ecclesiarchy verse. Sometimes, our litanies would involve a particular person. I know that Faria’s had been her twin sister, who had died when she was very young, singing the nursery rhyme ‘The High Lords Came Unto the City’.
Mine was a passage from The Heretikhameron, or ‘Days of Heresy’, a long verse poem written circa M32, which recounts the War of the Primarchs. I never read it all, and it was tortuously complex, but I remember the grand style of the opening book, with all its epic images and its declamatory tones, speaking of the ‘Bright Emperor’, and the Nine Sons Who Stood, and the Nine Who Turned. Sister Bismillah used to read it to me in the dormitory of the Scholam Orbus. I think the orphanage only had the first book in a little yellow volume. Anyway, my tempering litany is not just those words, it is Sister Bismillah’s voice reciting them. She is, I suppose, the most maternal influence I have ever known in my life, so her soft voice was an important part of it.