In short, my lord, this is the situation. For want of any definite communiqué, our enemies on Eustis Majoris now assume that we are dead. My chartered ship, the Hinterlight, seriously damaged in the battle, is moving at low speed to the Navy yards on Lenk, where I have made arrangements for it to be repaired. Along with my warband, I have procured transit aboard a freelance merchant ship called the Arethusa, which is giving us passage back to Eustis Majoris, via Encage, Fedra, Malinter and Bostol; in other words, by an indirect route away from the Lenk/Flint trade lane.
We intend to re-enter Eustis Majoris clandestinely. Our enemies believe us dead, and I do not intend to disabuse them of that idea. Undercover, anonymous, we will infiltrate the upper levels of the Administry on the capital world and attempt to reveal the corruption there.
Or die trying.
That is why I am writing to you in this way. What we seek to uncover may run high. Jader Trice is second only to the Lord Governor Subsector, Oska Ludolf Barazan, himself. My lord, I may be about to topple the highest from power. The Angelus sub might be plunged into confusion. I beg of you, stand ready. I don’t know how far up this goes. For this reason, I am now operating under the terms of Special Condition status.
As far as the galaxy is concerned, I am dead. My warriors are dead. We will play that deceit as far as it goes until it becomes the truth. At that time, may it be far off, the Emperor protects, I trust you will action this missive and mobilise the ordos to finish what I have started.
In the name of Terra!
Your friend and servant,
Gideon Ravenor.
THE SCRATCHING STYLUS creeps to a halt. I instruct the transcriber to encode the document, keying it to a pheromonal sample of Rorken kept in my chair’s databanks. Then I retract the mechadendrite and turn away.
There is one thing I have not covered in my report to the grand master. One detail. On our way back down through the edgeworlds of the Angelus sub, we diverted to the waste-world Malinter because of a summons from an old friend. Call him Thorn. He warned me of a danger, a danger that had been predicted and foreseen. It might be me, it might be one of my team. But something was going to happen on Eustis that would make the Imperium shake.
I wanted to believe it, but I couldn’t see it. Thorn, God-Emperor watch him, was not as reliable as he used to be. I feared his judgement was off. I am sound. So are my people. I trust them all with my life.
Maybe he had meant Unwerth.
There is a knocking at my cabin hatch.
‘Yes?’
‘Master Ravenor, I would be obligated if you might spare a momento or two to circumcise this star chart I am grandiose to be embrouchuring for your diverse perspicacity.’
Unwerth. Throne, let it be Unwerth that Thorn warned me about.
Throttling him would be a pleasure.
PART ONE
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
ONE
JAIRUS HAMMERED AS moody as any, when the whet was on him, and the whet was on him now. Blurry souled, knuck-brained, his left hand twitching like a beater-box, he woke from a dream where he had been awake all the time, dreaming of sleep.
Jairus was gut-hollow hungry, and thirsty after the last flect. His eyes were filmy, because they had been open and unblinking all the while he’d been asleep, staring at the pimple-board tiles of his hab’s ceiling.
Outside the broken window, the city boomed, boomed as loud as the burning city that had backdropped his waking dream. Snatches of looped triumphal marches from the public tannoys, street-vendor cries, pound music from the sink-level clubs, the drum of rain, bells, the whit-whup whit-whup of a Magistratum cruiser going past at full pursuit.
The sounds of down-stack Petropolis.
Craproaches ran up and down inside the panes of his eyes, and Jairus moaned aloud, until he realised the roaches were real and the surface they were running up and down on was the cracked plastek of his hab’s casement.
Jairus found his gun under a sweat-wet pillow. A knockoff Hostec 13 long-jaw, twenty in the clip, two in the spout. Reassuring as a mother’s love. He aimed it at one of the roaches.
Then he lowered his hand. Waste of a load. Man could get more for the price of a bullet than one bug. Specially when the whet was on him.
Saint, but it was.
He staggered to the wash sink and stared at himself in the mirror over the bowl. The mirror was dent-smashed. He’d done that with his forehead the night before last, starving for a look to flect him happy, angry with the mirror for being so…
…so nothing. So empty.
Jairus felt like butting it again, but his reflection showed a forehead still crusted with blood from the last time.
He saw himself. A mound of vat-grafted muscle, a face peppered with clan-piercings. A tongue – and he unrolled it now – fitted with its own snapping teeth at the tip.
Beauty boy. Slab-clanner. Moody hammer.
In the cracked room behind his face, Nesha was still unconscious on the mattress. She lay twisted on top of the cover, her naked body dancing with snake tattoos. Two cobryds were twisted over her belly and up around her bosom, the gaping mouths framing her dark nipples. She would be out for hours. But when she woke, she’d want a .look too.
More than want.
Need.
Need, screw you very much sir, need.
Going out time. Hunting time. Scoring time. Jairus flexed his arms and saw the gun still in his right paw. Just so.
He grabbed his coat and his big black gamp.
STREET LEVEL, THE city booming still. Burn alarms singing from the street posts as the rain pelted out of the west, showing up like a laser blitz in the sodium glow of the sidewalk lanterns. Vehicles splashing by the bell, the bell again.
The bell. Jairus followed the sound.
At the junction of Rudiment and Pass-on-over, there was a chapel. A select place, reserved for highborn worship. The bell was ringing from the acid-gnawed tower. Grand men in long-tail coats were hurrying along the pavement to attend the service.
Jairus joined them, gamping for one of the fine fellows.
‘My thanks,’ the man said, as they reached the chapel door, and palmed Jairus a coin. Jairus folded his gamp and let the rain trickle off it. Always a useful tool, the gamp. Everyone needs a gamper in Petropolis. Jairus had got his from a ten year-old boy he’d knifed to death in the underpass below Golgotten Walk.
They were closing the chapel doors. Jairus slipped inside, into the dry gloom, and made a hasty observance at the sacristy so he wouldn’t look out of place. Down the aisle, the gentlemen were settling in the front few pews as the cleric took the silk cloth off the triptych of Saint Ferreolus, a patron of automation.
Light sang down in colours through the apse windows. Unnoticed, Jairus shuddered as an aftershock of his last look fluttered through him. He took a seat at the back. He smelled the acid in the rain dripping off his furled gamp as it bit into the marble floor. The gun felt deliriously heavy in the hip pocket of his coat.
The service was beginning. The same old junk. The cleric intoning, and the unison answers echoing back from the congregation. Jairus was back in the embracing shadows. Down the front, the gilded triptych was caught in a jetting beam of white light from the overheads, haloed, almost glorious. The cleric’s hands moved in front of it, making symbols, like pale puppets.
Head down, Jairus looked left. He saw the temple boys waiting behind the dossal, straightening their cassocks and mantles, whispering to each other as they prepared the censer, the magnetum and the plate.
The plate. The offering plate. That was what Jairus was interested in. A congregation like this, rich men from the inner formals… that plate could be a major score. Forget flects for tonight. This would be a week of looks, plus enough lho and yellodes to cushion the come down afterwards.
He was still twitchy. Calm, calm, he told himself.
He blinked. The cleric had just said something that sounded odd. The congregation answered. As Jairus watched, the cler
ic touched the top of the triptych and it folded in on itself.
The tri-part image it then revealed was worse than anything he’d ever seen, even in his worst looks. He gasped and jumped in his seat. The images, the images, they were so…
. ..they reminded him of the dream of the burning city.
Jairus realised he had wet himself involuntarily and cried out. Too much noise. The entire congregation, and the cleric himself, was looking back at him.
Just make your exit, just make your exit nice and nothing needs to—
‘Hello,’ said the man, sitting down beside him in the pew.
‘U-hh,’ was all Jairus could manage.
‘I think you’ve come in for the wrong service,’ the man said gently.
‘Uh. I think so.’
The man was lithe and long-limbed, his face lean and refined. His clothes were dark, immaculate. His hands were gloved.
‘What’s your name?’ the man asked. ‘My name is Toros Revoke.’
Say nothing, Jairus thought. ‘My name is Jairus,’ his mouth said anyway.
‘How d’ye do, Jairus? You’re a clanner, am I right? A… what is it now… a “moody hammer”?’
‘Yessum, sir.’
‘And you’re… how does it go… “witchy for a look”?’
‘Yessum, sir, I guess I am,’ Why are you answering? Why are you answering him, you knuck?
‘Bad luck, old boy,’ the man said, and patted Jairus reassuringly on the thigh. Jairus cringed. ‘You weren’t meant to see any of this. Closed chapel, you see. How did you get in?’
There was something about the man. Something in his eyes or tone that compelled Jairus to answer, even though he didn’t want to.
‘I… I pretended I was a gamper, sir.’
‘Did you? How cunning.’
‘Master Revoke?’ the cleric called from the front. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘Just a poor man who mistook his way into our assembly, father. No need for a fuss. He’ll be going shortly.’
The man looked back at Jairus. His pupils were stale yellow, like burned-out suns. ‘What were you doing here?’ he asked softly.
‘I was just…’ Jairus began.
‘Intending to rob the collection plate,’ the man said, looking away. ‘To afford the price of a look. You were going to hold up this entire body of good people to slake your habit.’
‘Not I, sir, I—’
Somehow, the man had got hold of Jairus’s gun. He held the weapon up.
‘With this.’
‘Sir, I…’ Jairus fought the man’s compelling force. This was madness! He was a slab-ox, vat-built, he ought to be able to crush a wimp like this in a heartbeat. He— He swung around, grabbed the man by his dove-grey lapels and smashed him repeatedly against the pew back until the skull cracked open, red and wet. Then he ran for the chapel door and—
Jairus was still sitting in the pew, unable to move. The man was smiling at him. ‘Interesting idea,’ the man said. ‘Very robust. Very direct. But… never going to happen.’
‘Please…’ Jairus mumbled.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ the man said, reaching his free hand into his tailored coat, his other hand toying with the heavy handgun. ‘Here’s one on me.’
He handed Jairus a small parcel wrapped in red tissue paper.
‘Now… get on your way.’
Two rectors unbolted the chapel doors for him. Jairus ran.
HE GOT AS far as the ironwalks above Belphagor Under-sink before the steel teeth of panic finally began to relax their bite. His breathing was ragged and he was twitching all over. He grabbed the handrail for support, leaning over, ignoring the acid-itch on his palms from the recent rain.
The man had been bad enough, but the other thing… the tri-part image revealed when the triptych slid open.
Most Glorious Throne of Terra, what a thing! Of all things holy, that certainly wasn’t one of them.
The city sub-levels lay below him, a blizzard of lights in the darkness under the ironwalk. Jairus wanted to calm down, relax his pumping heart.
He took out the parcel the man had given him, unwrapped the red tissue paper and looked at the flect. That would do it.
Except… that man, that soft-spoken man with his stale yellow eyes. How could he trust a man like that who simply gave flects away?
Jairus weighed the lump of glass in his hand, then turned and threw it into the darkness off the ironwalk.
‘Shame.’
Jairus turned. The man was sitting on the ironwalk stairs behind him. He looked like he had been there for hours. He was smoking a lho-stick in a long holder which he held pinched between his slim, gloved fingers.
‘That would have been quick and clean. There would have been pain, but only very briefly.’
Jairus bunched his fists.
‘We now have to move to other options.’
‘What are you… what… what…?’ Jairus stammered.
‘You saw too much. Far too much. And I’m a secretist. I’m paid to ensure there are no loose tongues. And your fine augmented tongue, Jairus… well, it looks loose to me.’
‘I shall do this?’ inquired a whisper-thin voice. Jairus realised that there was a second presence, standing on the stairs behind the man. So thin, so pale, almost transparent.
‘No need, Monicker,’ the man said, getting to his feet. ‘I feel like some practice.’
The man flicked away his lho-stick, slid the holder into his pocket, and took a step towards Jairus. The half-visible figure behind him remained motionless.
‘It really could have been quick,’ the man whispered. ‘With the flect, I mean. A happy way to go. It’s not going to be quick now. And it certainly isn’t going to be painless.’
Jairas settled his shoulders low and raised his hands. ‘Let’s see,’ he replied. It was the boldest thing he’d ever said. And it was the last thing he’d ever say.
The man uttered something. A word that wasn’t a word, a sound that wasn’t a sound. A single syllable.
Jairus reeled. He felt as if he’d been smacked in the face with a jackhammer. Blood sprayed from his mashed nose.
‘Is good,’ whispered the half-visible figure.
‘It gets better,’ said the man. He said three more un-words in quick succession, his lips flexing oddly to make and accommodate the sounds. Jairus shuddered as something broke his collar bone, something else shattered his left elbow and something else splintered his right knee.
He fell down. The pain was enormous. Years before, he’d been beaten by a rival clan crew. They’d used panel-hammers. He’d been in the public ward for eight months.
That had nothing on this.
The man stood over Jairus, who clawed at his trouser leg. The man announced some more un-words.
Jairus’s teeth exploded out with the first. All of them. Incisors like cracked porcelain, molars like bone pegs with their bloody roots. His tongue burst. The second un-word detonated his spleen. The third caved in his ribs and collapsed his right lung. The fourth relapsed his colon. Blood was pouring out of him, through every natural exit it could find.
A final un-word. Jairas’s kidneys were quivered to mush.
‘He now is dead?’ the half-visible figure asked.
‘Ought to be,’ said the man. He paused and raised a glove to his face, dabbing a tiny trickle of blood that leaked from his own lower lip.
‘Your technique, it improves,’ his companion noted.
‘Practice makes perfect,’ the man replied.
Jairus was still twitching. The blood draining out of him was streaming through the open mesh of the iron-walk deck.
‘Can’t leave him here,’ the man said. ‘The wound-type is very… singular.’
‘I will not carry him. Not I. He smells, and he is messy.’
The man looked up and called out: ‘Drax?’
A third figure appeared, up at the roadway level. He was tall and slender, hunched about his heavy shoulders. A mane of wispy grey ha
ir framed a face that was curiously shallow and wide, with small piggy eyes and a massive jaw that gave him an underbite.
‘Mister Revoke?’
‘Pick him clean, please.’
The newcomer, Drax, hurried down the stairs to join them. He was wearing a skin-suit of leather jack-armour with a row of buckles down his chest, but his entire right arm and hand were encased in a thick gauntlet of chainmail.
‘Step you back, then, Mister Revoke,’ he said. He took a psyber lure from his belt, unwound the silver cord and began to spin it in slow circles. The lure made a humming murmur.
‘Here they come, the little beauties.’
Jairus coughed blood suddenly and opened his eyes. He stared up at the sky.
The last thing he saw were the sheen birds, hundreds of them, mobbing down out of the dark towards him, metal pinions fluttering. They were the last thing he saw because they went for his eyes first.
The last thing he felt was agony. It lasted for six whole minutes as the sheen birds pecked and stripped the flesh from his bones.
TWO
SO, LATE IN the year 402.M41, we returned to Eustis Majoris to finish the work.
It had been well over twelve months since we had last stood together upon that dark, overpopulated planet, and we returned now incognito. Our enemies believed us to be long dead. So much the better. Secrecy was the only real weapon we had left. From the moment of our return onwards, everything would be secrets and lies, until death rendered all things equal and void.
On the last night of our journey back, I visited my comrades, one by one. It was a courtesy I paid out of respect. I was about to ask a lot from each one of them.
I FOUND HARLON Nayl hunting game on a shelf of evergreen forest below a pearl-white glacier. The air was cold and thin. Will Tallowhand was with him, and they were walking together with their long rifles leaning across their shoulders.
I approached through the long grass, spreading my hands to ruffle the stalks that swished around me. Will saw me first. He turned and smiled at me, then tapped Harlon on the shoulder.
Will Tallowhand had been dead a long while. He called something out to me that I couldn’t catch. By the time I’d reached them, he had faded away like smoke.