Kara Swole’s body, blank-eyed, leapt up from prone by arching its back. It deflected a mallet-swing with an under-turned hand, and then side-kicked one of the slingbladers in the chest so hard his sternum snapped like a dry branch.
The sling-blade flew up out of his limp hand, spinning in the air. Kara Swole’s left palm lunged out to connect with it – not to catch it but to slap it away, altering its trajectory and greatly increasing its momentum. A clanster dropped his mallet with a thump, and groped up to feel the brand new piercing in his forehead. Then he fell over onto his back.
Straight-legged, bottom out, Kara Swole’s body bowed low to avoid a swing from the other mallet, and then it leapt up, spinning horizontally in the air, and delivered a kick with both feet to the face of the mallet wielder.
She landed on her feet, grabbed the other slingblader by the lower jaw, her fingers gripping inside his mouth, and threw him right over onto his back. A back-stamp with her left heel crushed his windpipe. The leader came in, chain-fist shrilling. One of the abandoned mallets was now turning in her hands. She swung it out so the head of it met the punching glove-weapon coming the other way. The mallet-head was completely abraded away in seconds, but it was a duracite tip, and eating it up burned out the drivers of the chain-fist’s mechanism. Smoke gusted out of the seized device. Kara Swole’s body jammed the splintered end of the mallet-haft into the leader’s chest with both hands.
Surrounded by the bodies of the dead and crippled, Kara’s own form began to shudder and shake. It dropped down onto its knees, gasping.
Fierce spotlight beams framed it abruptly. Her eyes didn’t react to the light.
‘Magistratum! Magistratum! Don’t make another move or we shoot!’
Pinned in the spotlights, Kara’s hands slowly rose in a gesture of surrender.
Armoured and ominous, belligerent figures swept into the light around her, handguns aimed, power-mauls raised.
‘On your face! Down! On your face!’
‘I have authority,’ Kara Swole’s voice said, though it wasn’t her own voice at all.
‘You do, huh?’ crackled one of the Magistratum troopers through his visor-mic. ‘What kind of frigging authority explains this?’
Her face, blank-eyed and expressionless, turned up towards him. ‘The authority of the Ordo Xenos, officer. This is an officially sanctioned operation and I am Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor. Please think very carefully about what you do next.’
TWO
ACCORDING TO ZAEL, there was a good place down at the south end of Formal L, on the overfloat. Genevieve X ran all the serious business on the overfloat, mostly from semi-legit fronts, but there was a place you could go if you wanted to see her yourself.
Zael had never been there in person. He’d never met Genny X nor, as far as he knew, done business with her clan, but it sounded like the sort of big deal the guy was looking for. At first, Zael had thought of taking the guy to one of the smaller dealers in L, but he didn’t see that ending happily for him or the dealers. That’s when he’d got ‘The Plan’.
He was witchy for a look now, shaking a lot, and that made his brain rat-sharp and nasty. The plan was a nice one. No one, not even a big knuck-head like this guy, came down Genny X’s place looking for mood. Zael would lead him down there and let the X’s hammers do the rest. According to the Plan, Zael would slip away during the mayhem or – and this was where the Plan got clever – he’d make such an impression with Genny X for selling out the guy to her, she’d be grateful and generous. Maybe give him a freebie look, maybe even offer him a job. Shit, wouldn’t that be a step up? Even if Genny X wanted him to be her new gamper, that was prestige. Hanging with the X. That put him stacks away from running for the likes of Riscoe and flat-brain Isky. Zael was so bloody pleased with the Plan, he had to remember to keep a smile off his face.
YOU COULD SMELL the overfloat long before you reached it. Waste outfalls, garbage slicks, estuary mud, all burned by the rain. It was always low tide under the overfloat.
Sometime way back in the whenever – history was not Zael’s thing – Petropolis had outgrown the patch of land it had originally sat down on. It had spread, like a fat arse on a bar stool. Up in the north, in Stairtown, it had invaded the hills. In the south, it had bulged out over the river bay. Originally, stone piers had been built out into the estuarine flats and over the water, their wide bases sunk deep into the ooze by the guild masonae. Then, as demand grew for cheap habs, elevated prefab sections had been constructed between the radiating piers, creating a whole city slum-quarter, forty storeys deep, suspended twenty metres above the silt and water.
It was always sick-damp in the overfloat. Moss grew rampant on every surface, and you were never far from the sound of gurgling bilges. Deep below, railed hatchways led down through the sink-bottom decks into the gloom of the water level, where you could hire cab-boats and wherries to get you from point to point under the slum.
The rain alarms were ringing by the time they got down to the rotting boardwalks of the overfloat, but that didn’t matter much because most of the surface streets there were covered over with pitched storm-roofs. In winter season, the overfloat got the worst of the ocean gales.
‘Lovely part of town,’ the guy said, in a funny, mannered way. Zael decided the guy was being sarky and meant ‘this town is so knuck-nasty it hasn’t even got a lovely part, but even by its own low standards this is bad.’ Typical snooty off-worlder. By then, that’s what Zael had decided the guy definitely was. An off-worlder. The name was a dead-give away. ‘Ravenor’. Shit! Why not just call yourself ‘Imperial aristo from a much richer planet than this’ and have done with it?
They wandered down the upmost deck of the Nace Street sink, past the stalls of the jettison-sellers and the drift merchants. Tide-treasure was on offer all around, most of it stinking and caked with black ooze. You could choose yourself a bargain, or – for a few coins extra – get the vendor to hose the thing off with his spigot for a better look. They passed a couple of mech-riggers examining a cylinder block as the vendor’s hose spattered the mud away onto the deck. Another merchant was offering IDs, pocket-watches, dentures, tie-pins and buckles, all of them cleaned up and laid out on a box cart. Quality merchandise that, dredged up from the down-below.
‘People throw the strangest stuff away,’ Zael commented, with a nod to the cart.
The guy said nothing. Just a shrug. Zael knew the guy was down enough to recognise that IDs and dental plates didn’t end up in the silt under the overfloat by accident. The thick mudwater down there in the dark was a useful disposal facility for clansters and footpads.
An ecclesiarchy preacher was haranguing the world from a push-pulpit on a street-corner, informing the passing crowds that their souls would corrupt and die unless they mended their ways and followed the light of the God-Emperor. No one was paying him much notice. Maybe it was his metaphor that was at fault. On Eustis Majoris, exposure to the sky did not equal redemption. It equalled faith paper, weeping sores and premature mortality.
On the next street, between the stalls of two more flotsam-sellers, an old woman was tending wooden cages. The sign above her stall asked for charitable donations towards the upkeep and preservation of sheen birds. The things in the cages ranged from the size of a crow to the size of a piphatch, and all of them looked weak and sickly, if not dead. Plumage had been torn or broken off, or eaten away, and eyes and limbs lost. Metal was exposed in many places, delicate wired mechanisms succumbing to rust and acid-gnaw.
‘A coin for the poor birds, sir?’ she called out to the guy as they went past. ‘Just a coin for the poor birds is all I ask.’ She wore a plastek smock and had a mag-lens taped over one eye. On the bench in front of her, a sheen bird was stretched out and pinned down for cleaning in the manner of an anatomical study. Its neck filaments buzzed as its head jerked around, and it piped piteously out of its tiny metal beak. Another bird, much larger and totally devoid of implanted feathers, perched on her shoulder. It was qu
ite a splendid thing, its wing blades and chassis polished chrome.
The guy ignored her and shoved Zael onwards.
THEY WALKED DOWN the stairs to the sink-base crossroads at Wherry Dock. Thirty-six levels of stack towered above them.
‘Where now?’
Zael gestured.
‘You sure? I’m having trouble believing anyone of clout could be found in this part of town. This better not be your idea of a trap.’
Zael flinched. Was the guy on to him? Had he cottoned on to the Plan?
‘Honestly,’ Zael said, trying to sound credible. ‘There are some class places. Genevieve X’s place is in one of the piers. Old money. Trust me.’
‘Trust you?’ The guy laughed. A nasty, grown-up laugh. ‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen standard,’ Zael said.
‘Try again,’ the guy snorted.
Zael didn’t say anything. He didn’t want to admit that, at some point since his eleventh birthday, he’d forgotten how old he really was.
GENNY’S PLACE WAS a six-storey mansion rising from the centre span of one of the old pier vaults, deep in the under-sink darkness. Even though the walls were dank and mossy, by the light of the deck lamps it looked impressive, and this seemed to silence the guy’s doubts. If there was any class at all on the lower overfloat, it would be here.
‘She’s the deal-engine this side of town,’ Zael said confidently. ‘They say she has links high up in the Munitorum.’
‘That so?’
‘Uh huh. A little backhand lolly every month and she can fix any colour of favour you want. Ident wipes, fake papers, travel permits.’
‘I’m surprised the entire population hasn’t come to her then,’ said the guy, doing his insufferable sarky thing again.
‘She…’ Zael began, and then checked himself. His enthusiasm to whet the guy’s appetite had almost made him say the first thing everybody said about Genny X. That she had so much moody hammer weight watching her action she was best avoided. Now, saying that would ruin the Plan.
‘She what?’
‘She deals,’ Zael improvised. ‘Looks especially. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Looks?’
‘That’s the idea.’
‘Okay, then. We go round to the side door, and I’ll make an introduction. Then we—’
‘Exactly how stupid do you think I am?’
‘What?’
‘I’m not going to walk in through the front door – or the side door – and let you do the talking, just like that. You think I got this old not knowing how to stay alive?’
‘Then what?’ asked Zael, feeling the Plan slipping away out of his fingers.
‘I have a plan,’ the guy said, which was exactly what Zael had been afraid of.
ON THE SECOND hard knock, the door opened. It was a simple but hefty wooden door, and it swung in on a mechanical bracket. The real door was the shimmering void-field behind it. Through the glitter of the energy screen, Zael could see a moody hammer glaring out at them. The man was big, his face-flesh decorated with acid-burned motifs and metal studs. South Overfloat Shades, by the concentric pattern.
‘What?’ the hammer asked.
‘Got a bit of business,’ said the guy.
‘With who?’
‘With the X.’
‘Concerning?’
The guy nodded down at Zael. He had Zael locked in a double arm-clamp. Zael’s eyes must have looked terrified enough as it was, but the guy gave his locked arms a painful little wrench and he squeaked for good measure.
‘This piece of knuck,’ the guy said.
Frig-damn me, Emperor, this was so not the Plan.
‘Not interested,’ the hammer said, and started to wind the mechanism that closed the outer door.
‘Okay. I’ll just let him get on with what he was doing. Hell, I’ll even show him to the Officio Inquisitorus myself. That’s in Formal A, isn’t it?’
The hammer stopped. ‘What’s the frigging Inquisition got to do with anything?’
‘That’s something I’ll discuss with the X and not her porter.’
The hammer drew a grease-black pivot-gun from his belt and then turned his head and shouted something away into the darkness behind him.
The void-field crackled and died. The hammer waved them in with the snout of his pivot-gun.
Just before they stepped into the dark hall, Zael heard something. Three words.
+Be careful, Nayl.+
‘What?’ Zael asked the guy
‘I didn’t say anything.’
THE ENTRY WALK into the pier tower was long and dark. The air was humid. Stinking like cattle, eight massive moody hammers – three South Overfloat Shades and five East K stackers – moved in around them as escort. They didn’t bother to frisk the guy. After all, what was he going to do? A hatchway ahead, beyond it a translucent pool of green light. The hammers led them into an anteroom and vanished. It was super-cool in there. Huge chrome vents crafted into the wall decoration pumped clean air in and stale air out. The floor was polished jet, inlaid with repeat fish patterns, and the high arched roof was lit by electro-lamps with turquoise shades. This was serious good living, the first Zael had ever tasted. It seemed a shame he was getting this first good taste at the same time as a shoulder-crunching, elbow-breaking arm-clamp.
‘Could you let me go now?’ he asked.
‘No.’
The guy looked around. Three tall, arched doors, all closed, led off the anteroom, besides the hatch behind them that had let them in.
+Three heartbeats, closing from the left.+
‘What?’ Zael asked.
‘What what?’
‘You said something about heartbeats—’
‘I didn’t. Shut up.’
The left hand door opened. A man wandered in, flanked by two more bulky hammers who took up sentry positions either side of the doorway. They were both Shades – senior members, by the pattern of their ritual-inflicted acid tattoos – and both held wire-stocked lasrifles.
Zael had never seen a lasrifle before. He blinked his fear away. The man was far more terrifying.
He was over two and a half metres tall and extremely thin. Not even stick-thin like Jibby Narrows, who everyone said could get good money working part time as a noodle. This freak was emaciated-thin. He wore a beautiful housecoat of vitrian glass, floor-length, and his arms hung from the sleeves like twigs. Twigs coated in gold foil, that was. His head was a skull with the merest hint of skin. His eyes were augmetic plugs; sutured in, multi-facet insect jobs. He smelled really good – a classy cologne or maybe even a flesh-wired pheromone aura. He didn’t walk. He hovered.
Pausing under the green lamps, he turned his reed-thin neck and regarded Zael and the guy.
‘What is the nature of your business?’ he asked. His words had sound and meaning, but absolutely no flavour to them. ‘Who’s asking?’ said the guy.
‘I am Taper. I am the Mamsel Genevieve’s seneschal.’
The guy hunched his shoulders, diffidently. ‘What we have here is an organ grinder/primate situation. Go fetch the X.’
‘I think not. You are very good at this whole, rugged machismo thing, but you really don’t understand the layers of protocol. The X doesn’t want to have to talk to you. The X doesn’t even want to have to deal with you. Mamsel pays me a great deal of money to process matters for her. I am her eyes and ears. I decide what she will or won’t review. Do you understand?’
‘Maybe,’ said the guy. ‘What if I act up and start throwing my weight around?’
Taper smiled. He hovered over to his waiting hammers, and held out a bony hand. One of them obediently drew a gang knife and put it into Taper’s palm.
Taper turned and snapped the blade. He didn’t even use both frigging hands. He simply snapped the twenty-centimetre steel with a flick of his twig fingers.
‘I am significantly augmetic, my friend. I chose to be elegant and slender because I despise obvious physical threat-postures. A massive torso, th
ick arms, a shaven head… such as yours, for instance. But I did not stint on strength. I could poke your bastard heart out with my tongue.’
‘I see,’ said the guy.
‘I think you do. Now. Explain the nature of your business. To me.’
The guy relaxed his grip on Zael and stepped forward, suddenly modest and unassuming. ‘Look, Sire Taper, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m a newbie to this world. Just got in a few days back, pulled the long haul from Caxton.’
‘And I should care why?’
‘I’ve got the slam in me. I can work and make action. I’m looking to get employment, but this frigging city is all sewn up by the clans.’
‘It is. So go elsewhere.’
‘Easy said. I can’t afford another out-ticket, not even a freezer bin. So I decided I needed to prove to the great and good here that I was worth having around. Worth having on the payroll.’
Taper slowly tilted his head and stared at Zael. ‘And you thought this would somehow impress us?’
The guy looked round at Zael too. ‘Well, not to look at, I grant you. But I got wind of what this little knuck-head was up to.’
‘And what was that exactly?’
‘I wasn’t doing nothing!’ Zael exclaimed.
‘Shut it,’ the guy told him. ‘This little knuck was out to make his mark. He was out to make his big splash. One way or another he knew about Genny X, and he had decided the Inquisition might pay well for the inside track.’
‘I frigging didn’t!’ Zael yelled. ‘For knuck’s sake, he’s making this up!’
‘He would say that,’ said the guy, grinning in a mean way.
‘I suppose he would,’ agreed Taper.
Knuck’s sake, they were all pals together now.
Taper looked at the guy. ‘So what did you have in mind?’