‘Akunin wants an audience with you. Pretty much demands it.’
Trice lit a lho-stick from the casket on the table beside his chair. ‘Shipmaster Akunin knows it doesn’t work that way. No direct contact between me and the contractees,’
‘Even so…’
‘Even so, screw him. What does he want to see me about?’
Revoke leaned forward. ‘Earlier tonight, a premises ran by the cartel’s chosen banker was raided. Burned down. A lot of deaths.’
‘Then the cartel’s a fool for using a financier who ran so close to the wind. Tchaikov was black market. She had any number of enemies. It’s not our concern where they stash the money we pay them. Die too, did she?’
Revoke nodded. ‘It appears so. I have my team sifting the wreckage right now. A gang dispute, I think. One of her rivals in the underworld.’
‘So… why is Akunin asking for me?’
‘He thinks it’s more than that. He believes it could be the work of someone who is trying to break our programme open.’
Trice frowned. He set his glass down and took a long draw from the smouldering lho-stick. ‘Is that possible?’
‘I don’t believe so,’ Revoke replied. ‘There was one potential troublemaker, but you sent him to his doom yourself.’
‘I did. Tell Akunin to get over it and use a more reliable money-launderer. But keep an eye on what you turn up. I don’t want us to be caught out. Was that all?’
Revoke rose. ‘Yes, lord. Thank you.’
Trice stubbed out his stick. ‘Thank you. Back to the party, I suppose.’
Revoke held the door open for his master, and Trice stepped out of the suite. The waiting Gubernatorial servicemen closed around the first provost to lead him back down the processional to the banquet hall.
An eight-metre square skylight above them exploded in a blizzard of glass debris. Looking up in the storm of falling shards, reaching for their weapons, the servicemen got one brief glimpse of the attacker.
The paired rhyming swords took off two heads and ripped open the torsos of the other two.
Jader Trice turned as the Brass Thief landed behind him. Glass fragments were raining down from the window, and the ripped bodies of the four servicemen were still falling, blood sheeting from their awful wounds.
Crested helm bowed, its arms like gold-sleeved pistons, the Brass Thief struck its rhyming swords at Jader Trice.
Trice gawped in dread as the razor-edged blades swung at him simultaneously. But he was a quick-witted man. He had already activated the displacer field built into his amulet of office.
Jader Trice vanished in an oily smudge of air, and reappeared ten metres away down the processional. The incunabula’s blades sliced through empty space.
It paused, lifting its golden, crested helm, reacquired its quarry, and bounded forward.
Alarms were suddenly ringing. Half a dozen armed Magistratum officers spilled out into the long hallway and found themselves between the chief provost and the golden daemon.
The incunabula didn’t break stride. It had ploughed through them before they had even realised what was going on. Two more armoured heads were carved in half, then the daemon speared its blades into two chests, somersaulted, and brought the rhyming swords down in scything strokes that cleft the last two from their shoulders to their navels. One of the final pair opened fire, but it was just a nerve spasm. Hellgun shots whickered up the processional wall as the man collapsed.
‘Avast thee!’ Trice yelled at the oncoming monster, his hands forming a hexagrammic sign in its face.
The incunabula recoiled for a moment, then spun its blades and pounced at the chief provost.
Auto-fire of tremendous force blew it out of the air before it could reach him. It crashed sideways into the wall, crazed the stone facing, and hit the ground.
Before it could rise, a second blaze of auto-fire smacked into it, tumbling it away across the marble floor. By now, the music in the hall had broken off and hundreds of voices were rising in loud panic.
Toros Revoke strode towards the crumbled incunabula, keeping the hellgun he had snatched from one of the butchered house guards raised and aimed. It wasn’t dead. He could see that. It had soaked up a lot of punishment, but still it wasn’t dead. Revoke started firing again, ripping the creature backwards.
Then the powerclip was out, the weapon dead, and the Brass Thief was surging up at him, renewed, blades whirring. The first chop sheared the hellgun in half.
Revoke flicked aside like a dancer, turning a one-handed spring that took him clear. The Thief jerked its golden head round, cocked on one side, as if curious. It swung murderously for Revoke again, and again he evaded, this time with a rapid backwards handspring.
The Brass Thief made an odd, pulsing sound. It was laughing in delight to have found an opponent who could even begin to trouble it.
It engaged Revoke again. This time there was no holding back. The dark-suited man and the golden daemon turned and spun and dodged and struck and ducked and blocked, inhuman blurs, faster than the eye could follow.
SAUL KEENER SHUDDERED slightly and groaned. The sound was disturbingly loud in the close silence of the lighthouse basement.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ Leyla Slade asked.
Orfeo Culzean didn’t reply. The lights of the fraters’ intently staring eyes filled the darkness around them.
‘Saul?’ Culzean said softly. ‘Let me look,’ He reached out his own right hand and touched its fingertips to the trigger orb. He pursed his lips as he began to share the psy-cast images.
‘I see the Thief,’ he said. ‘It’s found Trice. I see the chief provost, fleeing down a great hallway. But there’s someone in the way. A man. He’s preventing the Thief from reaching Trice.’
‘How?’ Leyla Slade asked.
‘He…’ Culzean began, uncertainly. ‘He is fighting with it. He seems to be unarmed, but he has closed with it. He… Oh, so fast! He’s matching it move for move, reading every cut it tries to make, evading. The speed, the skill is… phenomenal.’
‘No one can do that,’ said Leyla Slade. ‘Not against the incunabula. It’s not possible.’
‘It seems it is. I’m seeing it,’ said Culzean. ‘I knew Trice would employ seriously capable protectors, but this a revelation. The movements are so fluid, so fast, I can scarcely track them. But it won’t last.’
‘You’re sure?’ asked the magus-clancular.
‘The Thief never tires. The man will. And he is, as I said, unarmed. All he can do is protect himself.’
INSTINCT TOLD REVOKE he was just two, maybe three, strokes from running out of luck. He couldn’t sustain this pace of combat much more than a few seconds longer. He sidestepped the Thief and yelled an un-word in desperation.
The force of the un-word smashed the incunabula back fifty metres. It hit the processional’s side wall, cratering it, and fell to the floor.
‘WHAT… WHAT WAS that?’ Saul Keener gasped.
‘I don’t know,’ Culzean snapped. ‘Hold your concentration, damn it!’
REVOKE SPRINTED DOWN the hall and caught up with Trice. He started to hurry his master towards the nearest exit. ‘Securitas!’ he yelled into his vox. ‘Securitas to the main processional! Code black!’
‘What was it?’ Trice asked, his eyes wide with shock.
‘Not was, is. Still. Come on!’ Almost dragging Trice, Revoke reached the stairwell that led down to the palace’s wide courtyard. Behind him, the incunabula stirred and got up. It flew after its prey, down the hall, down the staircase, into the courtyard.
And halted. The raised weapons of sixty palace troopers faced it.
The men opened fire.
The vast barrage blew the stone doorway apart, shattered the lintel and punched deep shot-craters in the stones of the wall. The night lit up with a dazzling storm of energy bolts.
The incunabula came out of that fire, las-rounds bouncing like raindrops off the primaevally-forged metal of its sheathing arm
our. The rhyming swords glowed red with heat as they swung.
A guard lost his face in a burst of blood. Another went over, headless. A third staggered back, missing his left arm; a fourth was savagely deprived of most of his rifle and both the hands that had been clutching it. Still the shots rained as the Brass Thief hacked into their ranks. Two men toppled slackly, their waists clean-severed. A decapitation. A trooper fell to his knees, trying to hold his stomach in. Another fell on his back, his sternum snapped through. The troopers kept shooting, though they were now backing away, splashing through the pooling blood that was starting to cover the flagstones. An arm was struck off, a leg at the knee. A man flew backwards through the air, cut in two, and crunched down onto the roof of a parked transport, bursting out the windows. A trooper sank onto his side, clutching his visor. Another dragged himself across the slippery paving, trying to find his legs.
There was an especially vivid flash of light. A specialist trooper team hefting a plasma cannon had begun to open fire. The Brass Thief lurched as it was hit, turned, and threw one of its rhyming swords at the weapon-team.
Tip-first, the whistling blade tore through the plasma weapon’s breach and impaled the chief operator. Its power-pod ruptured, the plasma cannon exploded, incinerating the entire team in a boiling cloud of violet energy. The shockwave felled another dozen men nearby. A fragment of razor-sharp debris from the cannon’s focus ring zinged out and sliced through the neck of a guard officer.
CULZEAN SMILED. ‘OH, tell him to bring that, Saul. For my collection.’
THE REMAINING TROOPERS had broken in terror and were running for their lives. The blazing wreck of the exploded cannon formed a white-hot pyre at the heart of the courtyard, the leaping flames reflected in the oil-dark lake of blood. Bodies and body parts lay everywhere. Nearly forty men of the palace elite, butchered.
The Brass Thief stepped forward, the firelight glinting off its blood-flecked armour. It bent down and picked up the piece of focus ring and hooked it around its belt. Then it held out its empty hand and the rhyming sword it had thrown flew back into its grasp, plucked from the burning corpse.
On the far side of the courtyard, Revoke pushed Trice behind him, and turned to face the oncoming spectre of destruction.
‘Toros, old friend,’ Trice said. ‘Please, don’t let it get me.’
Revoke tried to reply, but his mouth was bleeding from the un-word he had used to knock the daemon down in the processional. That had been the only thing that had worked.
Though it hurt and tore his throat, Revoke howled another un-word. The advancing incunabula rocked back as if it had been hit in the chest by a tank round.
Revoke could smell psychic powers suddenly. The trace had probably been there all along, but he’d been too busy to taste it. He reached out with his telepathy, not at the approaching daemon – that would have been futile – but at the distant mind that guided it.
‘Toros!’ Jader Trice cried out. The Brass Thief was powering forward. Two more un-words, agonisingly voiced, slapped it back. Revoke’s real counterattack was somewhere else. As he shouted the monster down, his mind was soaring elsewhere, into the dark, into the depths of the city.
There. There. There! Some twitching lunk called Keener.
‘SAUL?’ CULZEAN SAID.
‘Mhhh…’ Keener replied.
‘Saul, disengage now. Right now.’
Orfeo Culzean tore his hand away from the orb to break contact. He had felt what was coming. A vengeful telepathic fury of hideous force struck Saul Keener like a hammer blow. He stroked out at once, his brain pulped. His eyes burst into flames.
With a violent, twitching fit, he toppled over, dead.
LOOSED, UNGUIDED SUDDENLY, the incunabula staggered, off-balance. It glared around the courtyard for a moment, the firelight dancing off its crested mask.
Then it mewed pitifully, writhed and flew off into the night.
Revoke turned and stared at his master. A huge tumult of panic and confusion rang from the palace behind them.
‘Dear gods without name,’ Jader Trice murmured. ‘All that I owe you up to now, Toros, is nothing. I owe you my life.’
Blood was pouring from Toros Revoke’s mouth. His lips were split. He spat out gore onto the flagstones, and a shattered tooth came out with it.
‘Just doing my job… lord,’ he lisped.
ORFEO CULZEAN CAUGHT the trigger-orb as it fell from Keener’s collapsing body. It was smoky-hot.
‘Shit,’ said Leyla Slade.
‘Indeed,’ Culzean said. He seemed almost amused.
‘What happened?’ Lezzard asked.
‘They bested us,’ Culzean said. ‘I offer my apologies, magus-clancular. I underestimated their resources.’
‘We have… failed?’ Arthous asked.
‘Tonight, yes, most probably. I am an expediter, Frater Arthous. You employ me for my skills and my experience. Not only because I know what to do, but because I know what else to do when things don’t go according to plan. This is just a setback. I’ll ponder for a while, and decide upon the next best course of action.’
‘A setback?’ Arthous seemed contemptuous.
‘Perhaps not even that,’ Culzean said. ‘Have the fraters look to their mirrors. Examine the prospect and its determiners over the next day or so. It’s possible that even without killing the chief provost, we might have derailed his involvement favourably.’
‘What of your servant?’ Stefoy asked.
‘It is cut loose, wild. It will return here in a few hours and shut itself down. Make sure it’s well fed, or it won’t be willing to serve us the next time we employ it. And we will need another psyker. Someone very able. I’d like the Fratery to procure one this time, preferably someone from off-world. Bring them here.’
‘Of course,’ said Lezzard. ‘Anything else, Orfeo?’
‘Give me time to think, magus.’
‘Yes, but the prospect—’
‘The prospect is the only thing that concerns me, magus-clancular. One hundred per cent, I will make it happen.’
Orfeo Culzean turned and walked up out of the basement, Leyla Slade at his side.
‘I think we should leave,’ she whispered.
‘We are leaving, Ley.’
‘I mean the planet. This is turning into a lousy deal. The Fratery might turn nasty if we don’t deliver.’
‘We will deliver. This is exactly why I choose to be in this game. It’s so seldom a real challenge arises. This is the one, Ley. The expedition that will make my name immortal. Can’t you feel it?’
‘I feel something. Those frigging one-eyes glaring at us. I say we make our excuses and quit.’
‘Leyla Slade, that’s hardly the backbone I hired you for.’
She shrugged.
‘I’m hungry,’ Culzean said. ‘I need a decent meal and some distraction. Is it too late for the last show at the Carnivora?’
‘I’ll check.’
‘Tomorrow, I want a day without interruption. And I need you to look out some books for me, some old almanacs from my library. Anything you can find on the subject of Enuncia.’
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
‘No one really knows any more. Just a memory of a myth. But that man tonight, the one who kept our Thief at bay. I’d stake my professional reputation on the fact that he was using it.’
ELEVEN
‘SO HOW DID this happen?’ Belknap asked, slowly packing the wound with sterile gauze and tissue-cleaner.
‘I cut myself shaving,’ said Harlon Nayl.
‘Right,’ said Belknap. ‘There was I thinking this was a gross wound caused by a side-blown round on the tumble.’
Nayl sat, stripped to the waist, on a wooden stool in the spartan kitchen of Miserimus House. The doctor’s practice bag was open on the table and the contents spread out. Kys stood in the doorway, watching, Zael at her side. It was almost an hour past middle night, and the city outside was deathly quiet.
‘You know a lot about
gunshot wounds, do you?’ Nayl said.
‘I know a lot about a lot, mister. There. Done. Keep it clean and I’ll check it in a day or two.’
Belknap looked at Kys. ‘Two, you said.’
‘The other one’s upstairs.’
‘All right, then. Show me. And, just so we’re clear, I’m not happy about this. Slaphead here is moody-class muscle, and you, I don’t know what you are.’
‘I can hear you,’ Nayl said.
‘I don’t care,’ Belknap replied. ‘I’m doing this for Zael, okay? And in return, I’d like you people to do something for me.’
‘What?’ asked Kys.
‘Let him go. Cut him loose. Give him a few hundred crowns… your type probably has that in change… send him on his way. Give him a chance, I mean, before this gang-life of yours swallows him up.’
‘Our type?’ Nayl said.
‘Shut up, Harlon,’ Kys warned. She looked at the doctor. ‘This is not what you think.’
‘It really isn’t,’ Zael put in.
‘A rented house, a gunshot wound, serious muscle, the need for a back-street sawbones. I’m not stupid, lady. This is connected syndicate stuff. You’re in something up to your ears. Tell me I’m wrong.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ Kys submitted. ‘We’re up to our ears.’
‘Show me the other one,’ Belknap said.
They went upstairs.
+Patience?+
+Yes, Gideon?+
+We appreciate this medicae’s help, but can he be trusted?+
+Zael says he can.+
+The question stands.+
+All right. Call me a woman of simple instincts, but I reckon if you cut the doctor through the middle, you’d find the word “trust” written right through him.+
+Let’s hope I don’t have to ask you to do that.+
Kys led Belknap down the upper hallway, Zael trailing behind them.
‘How did you sucker him in?’ Belknap asked her.
‘Zael? Actually, we brought him along for his own good.’
‘Your kind always says that.’