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 any more.
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 andered heads, and the armoured finery of off-world traders, sober-suited agents from the Departimento 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 mat 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 funnelled 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.
The firedrums lit the evening with greasy flames. The air was heady with the autumnal stinks of blood, dung, fire, herbivore gas and baled feed. They pulled off the viaduct, parked the half-track in a rockcrete yard where other tracks had been left, and went looking for the slaughterbaron.
INEVITABLY, THE LIVESTOCK trade up and down the Angelus sub overlapped the pit-game business. Traders shipping a hold full of pachs might as well make some extra fees carrying more dangerous animals for the Imperial pits, and game agents in need of transport often hired stock traders because they already had a lot of the specialised holding equipment.
The beast-moots of Flint were primarily livestock oriented. Occasionall
y drovers brought a great plains predator to market for extra cash, but the commerce of the Western Banks was essentially about meat. Further up the line, out towards Lenk and the rip-worlds, that was where you found the specialist beast-moots, the ones held entirely for the pit-trade.
Even so, Flint’s beast-moots were frequented by the game agents. Some were passing through on their way to Lenk. Others came to buy cheap meat-cuts for bait and feed: many of the pit-favourite carnivores grew too placid if cargoed in stasis, and a full grown taurosaur ate its own weight in meat several times over during six weeks live-haul. Some agents came to Flint to purchase big herbivores that could be goaded into violence for specialised bouts and others yet came because they were travelling as paying passengers on livestock trade ships and had no say where the shipmaster put in.
Baron Julius Karquin had ran Tusk Verge for sixty years. In his rich, off-planet robes and lime-clayed animal hide cloak, he seemed a man caught between two worlds, part businessman, part shaman. During the moot, he held court in one of the tusk-frame pavilions in the town centre.
An entourage of slaughtermen, tallymen and dynasts surrounded him, along with market advisors and record keepers. Distinguished far traders were admitted to his presence, many were greeted like old friends. Baron Karquin had done business with just about everybody.
There seemed small hope of getting close to him, certainly not without causing an altercation and revealing their authority. Already, from the wary behaviour of officials at the smaller moots, Thonius had realised the folk of the Western Banks did not take well to Imperial dealings. It was a free market, which depended on the good will of the rogue traders. The authority of the Throne was not welcome.
Kys tried to bribe a junior ledger-keeper for information, but it hadn’t worked. The baron had great power here, particularly during the time of the moot. He wielded Imperial authority by proxy. During a moot, a slaughter-baron had more power in his town than the lord governor sub-sector.
Karquin’s face was craggy, and his frame big, made bigger by the weight of velvet, chainmail and hides. His teeth were bad, his eyes hooded. On his head, he wore a circle-crown of bronze mounted with two polished ram’s horns, an ancient badge of office. The crown was mostly lost in his unruly black hair, so it appeared the horns sprouted from Karquin’s own brow. He had four of his many bodyguards by his side at all times. They were big men, dressed in the high-button coats of the slaughterman guild, but their chainblades were designed for combat, not rendering. They wore bleached antlered beast-skulls on their leather caps. The bodyguards saw to it that none but the most important clients got close to the baron.
‘We’re screwed at this rate,’ said Madsen. Thonius didn’t think he’d ever met anyone so pessimistic.
‘Let’s press the issue,’ suggested Kys.
‘And get in a fight?’ Thonius said.
Kys shrugged. Ahenobarb, just a big shape in the firelight, seemed to approve.
‘There are ways!’ Kinsky said sarcastically. He glanced at Ahenobarb and immediately the big man reached out to catch Kinsky as he fell.
‘What’s he doing?’ Thonius hissed.
Kys took a couple of rapid steps backwards and covered her mouth in shock. The raw, unleashed surge of psi-power had taken her off-balance.
‘Shit!’ she gasped. ‘He’s gone… left his body…’
‘What?’ Thonius said.
Kys pointed through the bustling crowd towards the great gaggle of people collected around Karquin on the baronial dais at the end of the hall. ‘I can feel him… hunting…’ Kys said.
‘Get him back here!’ Thonius said to Ahenobarb.
‘Kinsky knows what he’s doing,’ Madsen said stonily. ‘If we leave this up to you, we’ll be here all week.’
‘This is the inquisitor’s operation,’ Thonius growled. ‘You three are here under sufferance.’
‘Whatever,’ said Madsen and looked back into the crowd. Thonius stared too, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary. What was Kinsky doing?
‘That ledger keeper, just behind Karquin, on the left,’ whispered Kys.
Thonius found the man. Pale, old, wearing long, lime-caked robes and a necklace of bulls’ teeth. The old man had turned from a trencher of food and was leafing through the tanned skin pages of one of the massive ledger books. Each volume took two men to carry. They sat on ivory stands around the baron’s dais. The ledger keeper speed-read each page he turned with blank eyes.
Abruptly, the ledger keeper backed away from the volume, blinking and disorientated. Kinsky lurched and opened his eyes.
‘They’re not here, but they were expected,’ he said.
‘What?’ asked Thonius.
‘Captain Thekla of the Oktober Country is a regular visitor to this moot. The baron had prepared accommodation for him, and reserved several herd parcels that he believed Thekla would be interested in.’
‘So we are wasting our time here…’ Kys began.
Kinsky grinned at her. ‘There is an interesting part to this. According to the records, the baron knew Thekla wasn’t coming this season, because Thekla’s apologies and regrets were passed on to the baron this morning by a stock trader called Bartol Siskind.’
‘Who is?’
‘Master of the rogue trader Allure, and currently in the auction pens, bidding for flange-horn.’
THEY SPREAD OUT into the crowds and the firelit night. Moving into the shadows of a doorway, Thonius touched his wraithbone pendant and made contact.
‘The Oktober Country isn’t here and it isn’t coming, but we’ve got a lead on another shipmaster it may have had recent dealings with.’
+Details?+ Ravenor replied.
‘Bartol Siskind, of the Allure. Kinsky got the information out of a local mind.’
+I felt it from here. We will be asking Mr Kinsky to be more circumspect. He is powerful, but also crude. An incident here would be regrettable.+
‘Indeed,’ said Thonius. He glanced round. A couple of ragged drovers had just gone by, glaring maliciously at the off-worlder in the shadows talking to himself. ‘I’d better go. We’re going to see what we can get out of this Siskind once we find him. You’d better recall Harlon and Kara to the ship.’
+I will. Be careful, Carl.+
Thonius made his way through the crowd. Despite the gale off the sea, the night was warm. Four hundred thousand head of stock generated a significant amount of heat.
And smell. Already Thonius’s favourite buckle-back boots were ruined from the dung swilling the streets. He wafted his kerchief in front of his nose.
Staccato shouts echoed from the vast bowls of the auction arenas. Bidding was in progress. Confident, experienced-looking shipmen in winter coats, cloaks or body armour leaned at the bone rail and held up numbered cards as a dozen of the hugest quadrupeds Carl Thonius had ever had the misfortune to smell were circled in the paddock below.
But there was another source of commotion, above the chatter of the crowd. It was coming from behind him, back from the direction of the baron’s pavilion.
Casually, Thonius took up a place on the nearest arena’s overstage. The man next to him was a brawny red-head in a bodyglove and heavy cloak.
‘What’s that about, do you suppose?’ Thonius asked idly, nodding back in the direction of the pavilion.
The shipman scowled. ‘Some frigger brought a psyker. Got into the head of one of the baron’s people. Karquin’s gone frigging nuts, so the whole moot’s gonna slow right down until the fuss dies away,’ The man swore again. ‘I’m meant to be in Caxton in eight days with a hold full of sirloin,’ he complained.
‘A psyker,’ said Thonius. ‘That’s not good.’
‘Of course it’s not good!’ the shipman blustered. ‘Everyone knows they’re banned from the moots! Moot-law. No psykers, on account of unfair trading. Always been that way. That’s why the baron’s got his warlock.’
Of course, that’s why the baron’s got his warlock, Thonius thought. Of cou
rse, of course, and everyone knows that psykers are banned from the moot by ancient decree. Of course they do. Of frigging course.
He could hear Kys saying it. The stuff you know.
Well, it turns out this wasn’t one of them. Come to that, he hadn’t even seen a warlock.
‘What the hell have you done?’ the shipman asked him suddenly. Thonius started. Was the look of dismay on his face that obvious?
But that’s not what the shipman had meant. He looked down, over the ivory rail, into the street. One of the baron’s bodyguards was down there, chainblade in hand. Two ragged drovers were busy pointing out the man they’d seen talking to himself.
‘Oh shit,’ said Thonius.
TRIPLE SHUTTERS SECURED the holding cell. I waited as they opened in series. Vertical doors, then horizontal barriers, then an inner skin of verticals again, all sliding back into the recesses of the armoured frame. Then I moved through into the dingy cell.
Duboe looked up at the light and at me and groaned. He was tethered to the floor by a long chain that was fixed to his bracelet cuffs. The chain had enough length on it to allow him to lie on the straw pallet in the corner or use the chemical toilet. He was dirty and unshaven. A tray lay by the door, a half-eaten meal on it.
‘You again,’ he said.
Me again. Get used to it, I thought. But for the information he might yet yield, most inquisitors I knew would have had Duboe executed by now. He was criminal scum, exploiting the systems of Imperial society just to corrupt it.
He was also a strange one. He had no discernible mind-talents, but parts of his brain were unreadable. I had interviewed him a dozen times in the six days since we’d set out from Eustis. His mind had become ever more impenetrable. It also seemed as if he had been getting stupider.
‘What do you want me to confess to now?’ he asked, getting up on his knees.
I made no response.
Duboe stood up, tired but somehow triumphant. ‘Okay,’ he slurred, ‘okay… I admit it. I’m Horus, reincarnated. I am the arch-enemy of the Golden Throne. I am—’