Culzean sat down again. ‘You don’t really understand us, do you, Gideon? You don’t really understand our beliefs and our ambitions. We’re just evil, an evil to be stopped. And all evil is the same to you. It carries the same weight… me, Zygmunt, Slyte. You’re so blinkered.’ He stared at Ravenor intently. ‘You’ve been through the door, Gideon. I’ll wager it showed you a future or two. Pleasant?’
‘Inconclusive. But no, not pleasant.’
‘I know what Zygmunt and I saw when we went through the door. A galaxy in flames. An age of apocalypse. Daemon time. No Imperium except a burning shell populated by the last dying dregs of mankind. You don’t want that, I know you don’t. You’ve spent your life defending society against just such a doom. We don’t want it either. Our ambitions are wildly different to yours, Gideon, and in definite conflict. But Zygmunt and I can only flourish, prosper and achieve our own goals so long as the Imperium persists. The Imperium is our playground, mankind our instrument. We weave our schemes through the complex fabric of Imperial life, to benefit ourselves. I’m not pretending you’d like what we want from our lives, but it would be nothing compared to Daemon time. Slyte must be stopped. The alternative is too awful for any of us to contemplate.’
‘A truce.’ Ravenor said. ‘Molotch and I, working together, to defy the bond and destroy Slyte? This is what you’re proposing?’
Culzean nodded. ‘If you agree, Gideon, I’ll send you back through the door to Utochre. I’ll arrange for a message to be sent to you at Berynth, giving you this location. This world where we’re sitting now. You bring your people here, and we start to plan in earnest.’
‘If I refuse?’
‘Then you’ll never know where here is, and we’ll have to manage on our own. The Imperium may suffer. If you refuse, go back through the door and we’ll say goodbye.’
There was a long pause, stirred only by the evening breeze and the twitter of hedgerow birds.
‘Goodbye,’ said Ravenor. He turned his chair around and began to glide back up the hill.
‘I’m disappointed!’ Culzean called after him. ‘Truly, I am! You’re making a mistake!’
Ravenor ignored him. He re-joined his companions at the top of the slope.
‘What’s going on?’ asked Thonius.
‘Who was that man?’ asked Angharad.
We’re leaving,’ Ravenor said. ‘Open the door, housekeeper.’
The housekeeper placed the key in the door’s old lock.
They looked back down the field for a moment. In the dusk, Orfeo Culzean was still sitting on his chair in the corn ring, watching them. He raised his right hand to his lips and blew them a kiss.
‘I don’t like this,’ Thonius said.
‘You haven’t liked much of anything so far,’ Ballack snapped.
‘Open the door,’ Ravenor repeated.
The door creaked open. They saw the evening fields beyond the door frame, the first stars now bright in the violet sky.
They stepped through.
FIFTEEN
THE DRIPPING, STINKING bowels of an underhive surrounded them.
It was gloomy and oppressively muggy. Water – probably not rainwater – pattered down on them from high above, down the sheer ravine depths of the stack foundations. High above, a thousand metres up, tiny moving dots showed the criss-cross of upper level air traffic buzzing between the hive towers.
They heard running footsteps approaching down a nearby alley, a caterwauling laugh that sounded slightly insane.
‘This isn’t right,’ Thonius said, ‘not right at all.’ He looked at the housekeeper. ‘Why aren’t we in the right place?’
‘The route back is often not the same as the route there,’ the housekeeper said blandly. ‘The door chooses.’
‘How many steps until we’re back at the Wych House?’ asked Ballack firmly.
‘The door chooses. It’s not my function,’ the housekeeper replied.
‘Open the door again,’ said Ravenor.
The footsteps and laughter were getting closer.
‘Whoever is approaching,’ said Angharad, ‘they’re out of their minds on some substance. I can smell it on their sweat.’
‘You can smell anything above this general stink?’ asked Thonius.
Angharad ignored him and looked at Ravenor. ‘They will be violent. There will be violence.’
‘Open the door,’ Ravenor repeated.
The housekeeper tried the key. It refused to turn. ‘The door is not ready to be opened again.’
‘Open the door.’
‘We must wait until it is ready,’ the housekeeper said.
Thonius flinched as shots banged off loudly in a stack-sink nearby. They heard the distinct whine of a hard round spanking off stone. More laughter, shouts. A scream.
‘Gangs,’ said Ballack. He raised his laspistol and took a careful aim at the alleyway end, ‘pharmed up and juicing for an argument. First head around that wall gets a new nostril.’ There were more shots, closer now, and more screaming laughter. Angharad took up a place beside Ballack. ‘Don’t shoot them all,’ she told him, ‘Evisorex thirsts.’
‘You realise I wouldn’t be here to have all this fun if it wasn’t for you,’ Ballack said sarcastically. ‘You can thank me later,’ she replied. ‘Come on.’ said Thonius. ‘The door?’ The housekeeper tried the key. It turned.
RED LIGHT, HOT wind, red dust.
‘Damn,’ said Ballack, raising his arm to shield his eyes from the gritty wind.
‘Not this again,’ said Thonius.
The black volcanic rocks loomed in the distance above the sculpted red dunes. The heat from the gunshot star burned their skins.
‘Not here again,’ he murmured.
For all her bravado in the underhive, Angharad was immediately spooked. ‘This is a bad place and we have to leave it now,’ she declared. ‘Something is coming.’
She was right. Even Ravenor could feel it in the back of his mind: a crawling itch, the same sense of impending doom that had surrounded them the last, brief time they had passed through the red desert.
The housekeeper was clearly affected too. Without having to be asked or ordered, the housekeeper put the key in the lock and attempted to turn it. The door remained defiantly locked.
‘Come on, come on…’ Thonius sobbed.
The wind picked up, scooping sand from the ground and winnowing it around them. The housekeeper tried the door again.
‘Come on!’ screamed Thonius.
The housekeeper began rattling the key furiously, and then started banging at the door.
‘It won’t open,’ the housekeeper cried. It was the first emotional expression any of the housekeepers had made. ‘It won’t open! My key doesn’t work!’
‘No!’ cried Thonius.
‘Keep trying,’ Ravenor said.
‘Oh look, by the blood of my clan, look!’ Angharad called.
Something had appeared, cresting the line of black rocks. It looked like a wave at first, like fast-flowing liquid spilling over the rocks in a flood and rushing on across the duned regolith towards them.
But it wasn’t liquid.
‘Open the door,’ said Ravenor firmly.
‘It won’t open!’ the housekeeper screamed back.
The wave was made of organisms, a swarm of fast-moving black and white creatures. They came on in a rippling, scurrying tide, chittering and yapping. Organic armour glinted like lacquered steel in the sunlight. The organisms were man-sized bipeds with torsos and heads hunched low and forward like sprinters, and rigid, spike tails held out high to counterbalance them. Their limbs and bellies gleamed off-white, like dirty ice, but their backs and long heads were a polished onyx black where the armour was thickest. Dead black eyes, mere slits, gazed out from behind heavy nasal horns. The snapping, chittering mouths were full of needle teeth. Four sickle-hook arms were neatly folded under their upper bodies. There was a smell coming off them that was even more distressing than the clicking, chattering
cries they were making. The smell was worse because it was not like anything any of them had ever smelled before. It was dry, and musky, and caustic, like wood polish, like fermented fruit-mash, like the funerary spices of a mummified corpse. It was all of those things and none of them.
It was alien in the most extreme sense.
‘Please, please open the door!’ Thonius begged.
Bounding, sprinting, clicking, the wave bore down on the figures at the lonely door, gleaming, jostling black and white bodies and bouncing counterbalance tails. They were so fast, so agile, so many. Regolith dust rose in a shimmering cloud above them, lifted by their scurrying feet.
‘Holy Throne,’ Ballack managed to stammer.
The front of the wave was on them. Long-hooked limbs flicked up to strike.
‘Open the door!’ wailed Thonius.
‘It’s too late,’ said Ravenor.
PART THREE
THE LONG WAY ROUND
ONE
SHE WAS FREEZING cold. Lucic had taken her environment coat off her in an act of petty spite. ‘That’s for losing my jacks,’ he had said sullenly, tossing her garment off the dock into the pool.
Lucic’s friend was evidently a bounty hunter or hired gun. Tall and coarse, with a well-conditioned body of sinewy muscle, and a face that had been decorated with puckered burn tissue down one side, he wore a bodyglove armoured with reinforcing plates, and a quilted, fur-trimmed jacket. His weapon of choice was a cut-down lascarbine, ex-Guard issue. The man himself was probably ex-Guard issue too.
He’d searched Plyton unsympathetically for concealed weapons, tugging out the little Tronsvasse insurance she kept stowed in her waistband. His grubby hands had gone everywhere, and he’d been smiling while he worked.
‘Pig,’ Plyton had called him when he was done. Without hesitation, he had smacked her hard across the face with the back of his hand, and knocked her onto the deck.
‘Hey, don’t!’ Lucic had cried out.
‘What’s she to you?’ burn-face had asked. The look in burn-face’s eyes had forced Lucic to shrug and back down. Not so much a ‘friend’ after all. Down on the deck, her face stinging and her eyes hot, Plyton had noticed this detail.
Burn-face had dragged her up roughly and forced her to sit on an empty lube drum.
‘Don’t move,’ he had instructed.
It was hard to track the time, but she figured an hour must have passed. Lucic put on his coat and started to pace, Plyton’s combat shotgun slung over his lanky shoulder. Burn-face had briefly dropped down into the underboat, and then returned, chewing on a ration bar from the boat’s supply. He had several other bars stuffed into his coat pocket.
‘So, what’s the play?’ Lucic had asked the hired gun lightly.
‘We stay planted here and wait for the word,’ burn-face had replied, munching. He ate fast and messily, like a wild animal. He sat down on a coil winder, and chewed some more. After a while, he rested his carbine against his leg, and took out Plyton’s Tronsvasse. He started to play with it, stripping it out, popping the clip, and flicking the safety on and off. He aimed it at several imaginary targets around the docking pool to gauge its qualities.
‘Nice piece,’ he remarked. He looked at Plyton. She avoided his gaze. The cold was getting to her bones. She was shivering, and sat with her arms wrapped around her body.
Burn-face ate another ration bar and threw the waxed paper wrapper into the pool. Through the grille decking, Plyton could see it floating beneath her in the grease ice beside her slowly sinking coat.
The hired gun patted his pockets. ‘Got a smoke? Lho or anything?’ he asked Lucic.
‘I’m out,’ said Lucic distractedly, taking out his link and staring at it as if willing it to chime.
Burn-face looked at Plyton. ‘You?’
She shook her head. Then, on inspiration, added, ‘They were in my coat.’
Burn-face glared at Lucic. ‘You daft bastard,’ he growled.
Out here, a man needs all the friends he can get, eh? Well, Lucic, you’re losing your only one fast.
‘Best find something else to do to pass the time,’ burn-face mused. He looked at Plyton again. ‘You cold?’
She nodded.
‘Maybe we get you a little colder still, then warm you up some.’
‘Hey!’ Lucic said. ‘Don’t be getting nasty with her.’
The bounty hunter got to his feet. ‘Don’t be getting nasty?’ he replied, mimicking Luci8’s prissy outrage. ‘Frig you, nasty is what we do.’
‘Even so—’
‘I was told you were in on this. I was told you could be counted on.’
‘I can, I can,’ said Lucic, hastily. ‘I did what you people wanted, didn’t I? I did it right.’
The bounty hunter shrugged. He was chasing a lodged scrap of ration bar out of his teeth with his tongue. He found the scrap and spat it out.
‘Big boys’ games now,’ he told Lucic. ‘Big boys’ rules. You better keep up.’
‘I can keep up.’
‘So why you so protective of this bitch?’
‘I…’ Lucic began. ‘I didn’t know we’d have to kill all of them.’
‘Maybe we won’t. Maybe we can all be very good friends. We’ll see. They’ll call and tell us how it pans out.’
‘If it’s a no?’
‘Don’t worry,’ burn-face said, sitting back down and taking out Plyton’s Tronsvasse again. ‘That time comes, I’ll do her. If you know what I mean.’
Lucic scowled and resumed pacing the deck.
The bounty hunter eased back on his seat and stared at the lapping water below.
Another ten minutes crawled by. Plyton was getting so bone cold she was afraid she might shut down. Hypothermia. If she passed out, Throne help her.
There was a rumble and a shudder. The hanging chains in the wharf area, some of them massive, trembled and swung. The House was adjusting its stance again. Chunks of grubby ice that had formed around the chain links were dislodged by the movement, and splashed down into the pool.
‘It’s taking too long,’ Lucic said.
‘It takes as long as it takes.’
‘I’m going to call up,’ Lucic said, taking out his link again.
Bum-face shrugged. ‘Knock yourself out.’
Lucic keyed his link. ‘Hello? Copy back. This is Lucic in the dock. What’s taking so long up there?’
‘I DON’T NEED your frigging agitation in my ear, Lucic.’ Worna snarled into his wrist-mounted link. We’re sitting tight, so sit tight with us. I’ll tell you whoa or go as soon as there’s a whoa or go to tell you.’
The Wych House’s theatre chamber was painfully silent. Worna’s paid guns had spread out around the room in a securing spread. The housekeepers had been forced down in a little huddle of seated figures, with two men watching them. The candles and lamps flickered.
Kys and Nayl sat side-by-side on the raised walkway with their backs against the outer wall. Two men had been posted to watch them too. One of them had been given the psy-scanner, and was studying it closely as if his life depended on it.
Which it does, Nayl thought, in a small, savoured moment of optimism.
Worna was standing on the upper platform, staring at the closed, silent door. They’d heard his side of the vox-link exchange. At the mention of Lucic’s name, Nayl had risked a look at Kys.
She met the look. Lucic. Betrayed.
Worna clumped down the steps to rejoin them. He towered over their seated figures, then squatted down. Kys could smell his breath. Gutter meat. Bad rations.
‘Taking a long time,’ he offered, almost comradely.
‘I don’t know what’s taking a long time, because I don’t know what’s going on,’ Kys replied.
‘Not so much talk from you, witch,’ Worna grumbled in his penetratingly low voice. He looked at Nayl.
‘What the hell happened to you?’ he asked.
‘Life happened,’ Nayl replied coldly.
Worna frowned.
‘We saw some fine times in the old days. You and me, and the others. Scored plenty. Now look at you, taking the Throne’s coin. What drives a man to do that, I wonder?’
‘I got a good offer.’
‘From the ordos?’ Worna laughed. ‘This Ravenor cripple?’
‘Originally, no. His master, Eisenhorn,’ Nayl replied.
‘Oh, yeah. I heard of him. Eisenhorn. Tough old bird. But he’s dead, right? That’s what I was told.’
‘I think he’s dead.’
‘And now you throw your lot in with this crippled scumbag?’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘No?’ Lucius Worna shrugged. ‘Maybe not. This isn’t some frigging loyalty thing, is it? Please, please, powers that be, don’t tell me Harlon frigging Nayl went and got himself a conscience.’
Nayl laughed despite himself, and shook his head.
‘Walk with me,’ Worna said, rising, and beckoning Nayl to follow him. Nayl got up and joined Worna in a long, slow circuit of the railed deck.
‘You wanna smoke?’ Worna asked.
‘A smoke’d be good.’
Worna flicked his fingers and one of his men proffered a pack of lho-sticks. They took one each, and the man lit them obediently.
Kys watched. The Harlon Nayl she knew never smoked these days.
Lucius Worna took a deep draw and exhaled. Nayl toyed with his lho-stick rather more circumspectly.
‘Wanted to get you away from that witch,’ Worna confided. ‘She’s bad news.’
‘If you say so.’
‘If I say so? What is this, be nice to Lucius week?’
‘You got the guns, you got the manpower, hell, you got the drop, Lu. What the frig else am I gonna do except be nice to you?’
Worna chuckled. ‘In your place, I’d do the same. But then, you always knew how to play a scene, didn’t you, Nayl?’
‘I’ve had my moments.’
‘Hell, yeah. Good work. We did good work. You remember what’s his name?’
‘Probably What was his name?’
‘Shinto… Shinko… Shimko… some frig like that.’
‘Alek Shinato?’
‘That’s the frigger!’ Worna exclaimed. ‘Throne, that was a good day. Sarum, on the look out. You got a tip on the down low and we were in. But how many frigging gun-happy trogs did that guy have waiting for us?’