"Don't touch anything."
"Well, duh!"
Nayl frowned. "And don't tell Ravenor I've got a lot of guns in here either. He'll only fret."
"Okay."
Zael took a sip from his glass and flopped back on the bunk so he was looking upside-down at the picts Nayl had stuck on the wall there. "Who's that?" Nayl looked across.
"That's Kara."
"She looks different."
"Her hair was black then. It was a few years ago."
"She's nice."
"Yeah, she is."
"Who's that?"
"That's Will. Will Tallowhand. And the girl is Eleena Koi."
"They look nice."
"They were the best. Friends of mine."
"Are they on board?"
"No, Zael. They're dead."
"Oh."
His feet stopped swinging for a moment, but he still lay on his back and stared up at the picts.
"My mumma and pappa are dead. And my granna. And Nove."
"Who's Nove?"
"My sister. She fell off a stack."
"I'm sorry about that."
"It wasn't your fault." Zael pointed. "Who's that?"
"Kara again."
"She looks so different each time."
Nayl leaned back and smiled. "That's Kara. But she's always Kara."
"Is she your girl?"
Nayl laughed. "I wish. Once, almost and sort of. Kara and me are friends now."
"She's laughing a lot on that pict. She looks pretty. Why is the bottom half of it folded up?"
Nayl frowned and leaned forward to look at the pict, then grinned and leaned back again into his seat. "Because I knew one day I'd end up with a maybe-teen boy in my cabin who'd ask all sorts of frigging stupid questions and get over excited at the sight of bare bosoms."
Zael sat up, maintaining his gaze on the pict.
"Her bosoms were bare?"
"Yeah, they were." Nayl cupped his glass and looked down into it. He remembered the night. Fooling around, drinking, laughing, making love. Kara had brought the picter along. Nayl wondered if she'd kept the pictures of him.
"I bet they're really nice..." Zael whispered.
"I'm not even going to have this conversation," snarled Nayl.
There was a painfully long silence.
"Teah, they really are." Nayl admitted at last. They both started laughing. Really laughing. Zael rocked back and forth, snorting and wheezing.
God-Emperor, it was the best laugh Nayl had found in a very long time.
"Understand me," said Nayl, fighting his laughter, "you ever take that pict down to look at the fold, I'll kill you."
"That's fair," giggled Zael. "You have lots of guns. Probably worth it, though."
"Oh yeah."
They burst out laughing again.
"Who's that? He looks like a real hard knuck."
"Who are you pointing to? Oh, yeah. That's Eisenhorn."
Zael looked at Nayl. "And he is?"
"Dead, I think. My old boss. Another inquisitor."
"The Chair's not your first boss then?"
Nayl smiled. The Chair. Funny, and obvious the kid would think that way. "No, I worked for Eisenhorn before."
"He looks like a double-hard bastard."
"He was."
"So how long have you worked for The Chair?"
Nayl had to think about it. It had been a fluid thing. He'd been in Eisenhorn's band for a long time, right up until the infamous mission to Ghul, really. But by then he'd also been working with Ravenor. When Eisenhorn disappeared, that arrangement had sort of become permanent.
"Since the late eighties, pretty much. Nearly fifteen years."
Zael nodded.
"Who's that?"
"That's Ravenor."
Zael sat up and peered hard at the pict. "He's really handsome. Is that what he looks like now, inside that chair?"
"No, Zael, it isn't."
"What happened to him?"
"Thracian Primaris, back in '38. The Triumph. A great procession of the great and good. The forces of the Enemy struck, and caused a... a... well, it's been called the Atrocity. Ravenor was caught in a firestorm and burned really badly. He's been in that force chair ever since. His mind is the only thing left to him."
Zael considered this. "That's really bad," he said.
"Yes, it is."
"And who's that?"
Nayl leaned forward to see. "Now, that's-"
He stopped. "Damn," he said, "I've forgotten to do something important."
Zarjaran. That was the new medicae's name. Zarjaran. Nayl nodded to him as he swept Zael through the infirmary towards the cryo-stacks.
The hatch opened. Cold air fumed out.
There she lay, sleeping like she had done ever since '86.
"Is she dead?" Zael asked.
"No, she's not."
"Alive?"
Nayl frowned. "Not that either."
"She's very beautiful."
"Yeah, she is. Look... every time I come back aboard, I make a point of saying hello to her. Maybe she can hear me, maybe not. She's been in this... state for fifteen years. She was Eisenhorn's most loyal ally, and a good friend to me too."
"What was her name?" Zael wondered.
"Alizebeth Bequin. Lizebeth? Hi. It's me. Harlon. Just come to say hello."
"She's frozen!" Zael said.
"Yeah. She's not dead or alive, just preserved here. Maintained in the cold-hold of the Hinterlight for a decade and a half. Maybe she'll live again one day. Maybe she's dead. I like to think she can still hear us."
Zael leaned forward and pressed his hand against the armaglas cover of the cryo-bin. His fingerprints remained as frost-blooms.
"Hello lady," he said. "My name is Zael."
TWO
"Screw this," said Madsen, turning and climbing back down the grassy slope. "It's a waste of time."
Carl Thonius nodded. They'd missed this beast-moot by several weeks. The vast stock yards were empty. A bitter gale swept across the derelict pastures where the tents and cage-pens had been pitched. Some rusting iron pegs and hoops and a copious amount of dried, white dung were the only signs that this area had seen any life in years.
The sky was grey and fast: sliced strata of cloud hurtling west across the salty margin, beyond which the dark ocean boomed and rattled.
"We'll push south," Madsen said. Thonius nodded again, but realised she had been directing the words at Ahenobarb and Kinsky. They were wandering the sparse moot-space. The psyker was saying something, but his voice was hindered by the wind. Ahenobarb hovered close to Kinsky, waiting, watching.
"What did he say?" Thonius asked, squinting. Madsen looked at him. The wind tugged at her white-blonde hair. "The usual psyker crap, Mr. Thonius," she said.
The Western Banks was hard, saline country, a ragged hem where the great plains of Flint's largest continent met the uncharted sea. The planet boasted a few thriving colony cities down in the temperate south, but it was out here in the unforgiving west that the trade on which Flint prospered was conducted: stock, beast-flesh, meat.
Dynasties of stockmen, drovers and herders inhabited the great plains, dutifully following routes and trails established by their ancestors, driving the super-herds. Straight-horn, flange-horn, demi-pachyderm, the behemoth tuskers. Drove-dynasties specialised in one breed or another, catered their skills and disciplines to that breed, but all for the same purpose: driving them west each season for the beast-moots along the Western Banks.
Moot-towns studded the broken coastline like buckles on a tangled belt: Droverville, Salthouse, Trailend, Huke's Town, West Bank, West Trail, Endrover, Fleshton, Slaughterhouses, Ocean Point, Mailer's Yards, Beastberg, Great West Moot, Tusk Verge. To each one, at the close of each season, the stock was brought in to market. Off-world traders thronged around each moot, landing their fliers and bulk-lifters on the scorched commerce fields to inspect the best of the merchandise.
Nayl and Kara had headed up towards Huke's To
wn and all points north. Thonius' team was covering the southern reach of the Banks.
The wind off the foreshore was picking up.
Kys was waiting for them by the half-track they'd leased from a drove specialist in West Bank. Thonius and the three Ministry agents trudged down to join her on the bleak roadway.
She was looking out to sea. The dark ocean was crashing in onto the rudely worn rocks, each wave impacting with a sound of shattering glass.
They drove south along the coast highway, the sea on one side, the slipped, craggy land on the other. The road was unmetalled and raw. Several times they had to slow to overtake work gangs on foot. Some were freelance drovers, shabby in treated hides, trudging with decorated herd-poles held aloft towards the next moot. They looked like troglodytes to Kys: skin-clad, caked in dung and clay that had dried white, their leaders decorated with skulls and antlers.
Other work gangs were slaughtermen, dressed in long, button-front black coats, and carrying the ritual chain-blades in engraved biers stretchered over their shoulders. Their shaven faces were marked with finger-drawn patterns of blood.
Kys slowed and leaned out of the cab to question them. "Beast-moot?"
Their answers were contradictory and useless.
They passed through empty, wind-blown coast towns: Endrover, Western End, Tally Point. The places had been scarred and eroded by the ocean's eternal blast and now, out of moot-season, were almost devoid of life. Tall grasses grew in the moot-yards: the buildings were shackled up and boarded. Paint peeled. The great raised stock-boards over the highway displayed fading chalk-scrawls costing last season's going rate for tusk-bison.
The towns were an odd mix. Big or small, wealthy or struggling, they followed the same essential pattern: wide tracts of commerce fields for the off-world ships to land, wider and greater moot fields where the stock was penned and displayed, and little clutches of buildings, the town itself. Taverns and barter halls, constructed in the local style, using great, curved beams as both wall posts and rafters, with a wattle-and-daub of mud-straw and flak-board in between, sat alongside more modern, rockcrete-built rendering silos. Kys wondered aloud where on this treeless plateau the locals had found the timber to raise the old barter-halls.
"Not timber... tusks," Thonius said. "Some of these buildings are very old. Traditionally, they use the tusks of mature animals as frame ribs."
Kys was driving. She slowed right down as they passed through Tally Point. The bare, yellowed ribs forming the superstructure of the weatherbeaten town hall were twenty metres long.
"What kind of animal carries-"
"None. Not anymore," said Thonius. "The real big, mature bulls were all slaughtered centuries ago, during the early colonisation. A bull has to live a good few hundred years to sport tusks like that. We'll not see their like again."
Kys looked across at him. "But they still herd these things here?"
Thonius nodded. "It's the key to Flint's economy. The big placental herbivores grow fast, put on a lot of mass. The great plains are lush. A demi-pachyderm can develop enough bulk to be worth slaughtering in under five years. But their tusks don't grow half as fast. Given the rate of supply and demand, this world will never see another giant bull with eighteen metre tusks."
"The stuff you know," she chuckled.
He smiled back. "I know what every trade economist worth his salt knows... and what every slaughterbaron on Flint chooses to ignore... at this rate of slaughter, Flint will be wasted out in another century."
She realised there was nothing but grim finality in his smile. "The stuff you know," she murmured again.
They pressed on south, through several dead towns that trade and life had already disowned: Fleshton, West Walkaway, Ling's Berg. The yards there were totally overgrown, the drystone pen walls collapsed. In each town, the buildings were faded and abandoned. Kys saw crumbling jetties and fallen-down piers half-overwhelmed by the ocean spray. Once the trade had come by sea, shipping the meat down to the southern cities on barges.
Not anymore.
There was a small moot in Mailer's Yards and another in Hidebarter. They spent a while in both, checking the moot's record books and ledgers for off-world buyers. The locals were far from compliant. Flint had no centralised record of its visitors. The moots compiled their own archives. Space traffic was deregulated. High orbit above Flint was filled with thousands of trading spaceships, none of which advertised its identity with a transponder. Only the ledgers of a town's baron could say who was around. Any trader who wanted to do business at a moot had to register himself.
In the crowded market places, amid the jostling, shamanlike drovers with their clay-caked flesh and antlered heads, and the armoured finery of off-world traders, sober-suited agents from the Departmento Munitorum went from dynast to dynast, performing the never-ending task of assessing trade for the purposes of Imperial levy. There was noise everywhere: the chattering bark of the drovers bartering, the shouts of the stock auctioneers, the clatter of tallyboards, and the constant background lowing of the vast flange-horn herds in the moot yards.
Neither moot had any record of the ship they were after. In Mailer's Yards, Thonius and Madsen went into the barter-hall to inspect the local baron's own archives. Kys waited outside on the ivory decking with Ahenobarb and Kinsky. The scrawny psyker went to the bone rail and stood, looking out across the jostling market towards the fuming sea. Kys could feel a pin-prickle of psi-use, but it was not directed at her. She wondered how many minds in that marketspace Kinsky was idly rifling through.
The facade of the barter-hall glittered brilliantly every time the sun came out from behind the chasing clouds. It was covered with thousands of silver disks, each one about a thumb-span in diameter, no two identical. They were all nailed in place. Fish scales, she realised, from some pelagic giant. They were as hard and simple as everything else on this beleaguered frontier, but somehow had a beauty that Flint did not.
Ahenobarb had seen the scales too. He reached out to take one down as a trophy, and then snatched back his hand. He glared at Kys, sucking blood from sliced finger tips. The scale edges were razor-sharp.
Kys unhooked three using her telekinesis, and floated them across to her. They glinted in the air. She hung all three over the top button-stud of her body glove using the nail-holes in their centres. They shone like a badge of office at her throat.
Thonius and Madsen emerged from the hall. They had learned nothing to their advantage.
"Except," said Thonius, "the Tusk Verge moot begins tonight."
The Tusk Verge moot was amongst the biggest held on Flint, almost on the scale of the Winter Great Moot and the Spring Drove. They drove the sixty kilometres to Tusk Verge through the late afternoon, and while they were yet some distance from the town, they saw the first signs of it.
Initially, contrails in the cold, bright sky. Criss-crossing lines of vapour that spoke of heavy inter-orbit traffic. Then a few fliers, shuttles, zipping over, then a pair of battered bulk-lifters that grumbled along overhead and blotted out the sun.
The traffic on the highway got denser. Herdsmen, slaughtermen, a few troupes of entertainers. Then caravans of slow-moving, high-sided wagons drawn by oxen or traction engines. The wind trailed back a chalky dust from the caravans that carried the sour bite of ammonia. There was money to be made from collecting up a herd's droppings and selling it on for phosphates and fertilizers. Colonies on mineral-poor worlds paid generously for Flint's excrement.
Just five kilometres from the town, they saw greater clouds against the horizon, billowing from inland. They were white, like low-mist rolling in banks, but they were dust. The dust of the super-herds coming in down the ancient drove roads.
The highway entered Tusk Verge over a stone viaduct two kilometres long. Beneath its broad arches, spread out on the wide coastal plains, was a portion of the moot's pens and gated yards, a giant patchwork of drystone enclosures through which animals could be driven, penned off, separated, counted. High-walled
droveways led up to the commerce fields where the cargo haulers of the orbiting trade ships lined up to be filled. In the failing light, blue and yellow flares came intermittently from the direction of the commerce fields, the afterglow of landing jets and atmospheric drives.
The stock was pouring into the town locale through the drove gates along the eastern perimeter. The ancient trackways and drove roads, scoured into the Great Plains by generations of herds, had been dug down through the coastal cliffs, forming high-flanked cuttings and gorges that funneled the incoming livestock down into the pens of the moot yards. Stockmen hauled on massive iron swing-gates, directing one herd or herd-portion into this pen, another into that. One dynast's animals were kept from another's, or a major herd was portioned down into commercial parcels. Brandsmen went from pen to pen, checking flesh-brands and ear slashes for provenance and ownership, while tallymen collected up bronze tally rings of appropriate value from drove men, and clattered them onto the abacus-like tally boards they carried. The rise and fall of stock values and the going rates for certain beasts of a certain weight was set by the slaughterbaron and his cartel, based on the accumulated tallies, and then chalked up on the massive boards overlooking the auction arenas.
Beyond them, lit by oil-drum fires, stood the long halls where buyers could inspect sample animals, and then the long, grim silos of the rendering plant. Some traders bought dead meat and salted or froze it for shipment to the cheap food-marts down sub. Others bought live and shipped it - sometimes in stasis - to more discerning clients on the wealthier hive worlds of Angelus. Some bought low quality in bulk, others high quality animals, individually chosen and purchased. Some came for the mechanically-recovered meat products of the rendering plant, others for phosphate dung. A ten tonne demi-pach might fetch twenty crowns a tonne, get turned into thirty thousand meat patties to be sold at half a crown a time in the food-stalls of a hive's slum-hab. A sixty kilo shorthorn might fetch five times as much, because it was destined to sell as a prime imported delicacy in the up-hive restaurants of Eustis Majoris and Caxton at fifty crowns a pop.