Scourge The Heretic Page 22

‘If I had a credit for every time I’ve heard that,’ Kantris agreed, the mask of affability back in place, and he signalled for more drinks. After they’d arrived, and Elyra had gulped the foul concoction down, reflecting that at least it was numbing her tongue enough to kill the lingering flavour of the rockrat stew, he nodded in a businesslike fashion. ‘Which brings me to the crux of our little meeting. How are you proposing to pay your way?’

  ‘I picked up a few things before I left,’ Elyra said, delving into her backpack, and adopting a suitably vengeful grin. ‘If the bitch wants them back, she can come down here and ask nicely.’ She laid a couple of items of jewellery on the shabby planking between them, and Kantris showed the first genuine expression she’d seen on his face since sitting down: astonishment, followed almost at once by naked avarice. The pieces had been carefully chosen to fit in with her cover story, opulent without being garish, finely crafted, and with sufficient signs of wear to have obviously passed through several generations of previous owners. Precisely the kind of things a noblewoman would cherish, and exert all the influence she could to recover, along with the body of the thief who’d dared to take them, the kind of things that could only be safely fenced off-world. ‘Would these be enough for a couple of tickets?’

  ‘They might,’ Kantris said, reaching out towards them, all pretence of reluctance to deal swept away by sheer greed. ‘What else did you get?’ Before his hand could close on the precious trinklets, Kyrlock lifted the barrel of his shotgun, his finger looped casually round the trigger, and the fixer checked the motion, gazing at him with thinly disguised apprehension. It seemed Kyrlock hadn’t been exaggerating about his reputation down here after all.

  ‘That’s her business,’ Kyrlock said levelly.

  After a moment Kantris nodded. ‘I’ll pass on the offer, and see what they say.’ His eyes followed the glittering prizes as Elyra scooped them back into her pack, and he stood, with a final effort at appearing casual, which he didn’t quite manage to pull off. ‘If they think it’s enough, and your story checks out, I’ll be back later. Enjoy your drinks.’ With a perfunctory wave of farewell, he hurried to the doorway and vanished into the night.

  ‘Are you mad?’ Kyrlock asked, as soon as he was sure Kantris was out of earshot. ‘Just showing him the stuff like that?’

  ‘It was a calculated risk,’ Elyra told him shortly. ‘I’ve met his kind before. We’d have been going round in circles half the night before he even agreed to talk to his contacts, and Emperor knows how long it would be before we got anywhere after that. This way we get moving straight away.’

  ‘Unless he decides to stab us in the back and just take the shinies,’ Kyrlock said, knocking back his latest drink.

  Elyra shrugged. ‘He’ll probably try,’ she agreed. ‘I know I would.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ Kyrlock shrugged too, evidently determined not to seem any less casual about the possibility than she did. ‘So long as you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Elyra assured him, with as straight a face as she could manage. ‘I’m making this up as I go along.’

  ‘Terrific,’ Kyrlock said, waving to his brother again. As Mung approached the makeshift table, he held out his hand. ‘Just leave the bottle.’

  The Fathomsound Mine, Sepheris Secundus

  099.993.M41

  At first it hadn’t seemed so bad down here, Horst thought, Vex’s discovery of the luminator system a welcome surprise. He’d expected they’d have to make their way through pitch darkness, with only the thin beams of their hand-held flambeaux to guide them. Instead, he’d found himself in a cavern roughly twice his height, fitfully lit by a string of electrosconces, which clung precariously to the cracked and irregular rock walls. A few broken tools and the rotting corpse of a wheelbarrow lay scattered about the chamber floor, their metal parts corroded with rust, presumably not worth the effort of recovering when the shaft was abandoned, and the broken ground underfoot was littered with chunks of rock and other detritus. Horst had no idea whether they were the result of human activity or natural erosion, although Vex could probably have told him if he’d seen any reason to ask.

  With a final glance overhead, to the square hatch leading back to the sanctuary of the diving bell, and the rope ladder giving access to it, Horst drew his bolt pistol. There was nothing to shoot at that he could see, but the weight of the weapon in his hand, and the power sword at his waist under the concealing folds of his overcoat, were obscurely comforting.

  ‘I’d be careful with that down here if I were you,’ Vex told him conversationally, reaching inside his robe to loosen his autopistol in its holster nonetheless. As his hand emerged, he gestured to the moisture slick walls surrounding them, down which water was trickling from a thousand cracks too small for the eye to see. ‘Blow a hole in the wrong place and we’ll be swimming back to the bell.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Horst said uneasily, keeping the gun in his hand regardless. He glanced round the dank and freezing chamber, trying to orientate himself. ‘Which direction do you think we should go?’ There were several tunnel mouths scattered around the cavern, all equally uninviting so far as he could see, the faint glow of widely spaced lux globes forming a flickering path into the depths of each one.

  After a moment’s thought, Vex gestured towards a tunnel mouth, which looked no different from any of the others to Horst’s untutored eye. ‘Down here,’ he said decisively, setting off along it without further ado.

  ‘How can you tell?’ Horst asked, catching up with him a moment later. The tunnel was cramped, the air moist and cold enough to catch in his throat, and he found he was stooping a little as he hurried along, even though the headroom was more or less adequate, almost as if he could feel the weight of the rock and the immense depth of water bearing down above him.

  ‘The cabling for the luminators is newer,’ Vex said, ‘which implies that this shaft has been used more recently than any of the others.’

  They walked on in silence for a while, save for the scuffling of their bootsoles and the endless dripping of water, the sounds of which echoed and re-echoed in the confined space, folding in so tightly that Horst found himself straining his ears for any other noise that might indicate that they were no longer alone. Apart from Vex’s persistent cough, which the cold, moist air seemed to be triggering more frequently than usual, he heard nothing, which, far from reassuring him, merely intensified his sense of unease. The chill and the all-pervading dampness were subtly debilitating, his clothes clinging wetly to his skin, and his hair plastered to his scalp, dripping water into his eyes with annoying regularity. The lux globes were getting further and further apart, so that, although not exactly dark, the narrow passageway was growing steadily more gloomy, the patches of shadow more profound, the deeper they descended into the mine.

  On several occasions the two Angelae found their way blocked by thick metal doors, orange with rust and slick with mould, which had to be shouldered aside with protesting squeals before they could proceed. Mindful of Vex’s words of caution about using the bolt pistol, Horst was able to divine their purpose without too much difficulty, and tried not to picture the torrent of water sluicing through the constricted workings these heavy barriers had been placed there to stop.

  From time to time they passed similar portals sealing side passages, and in a number of places the tunnel widened to a fair-sized cavern, where, evidently, a lode of some useful ore had been discovered and scraped out. By contrast, in other spots, the excavation narrowed alarmingly, the walls constricting so much that there was barely room to proceed in single file, or the roof descending so far that Horst had to bend almost double to make his way past the obstruction. A couple of times he might have given up entirely, believing that they’d come to a dead end, and determined to try their luck with one of the side galleries instead, if it hadn’t been for the faint glimmer of another lux globe in the distance beyond the latest obstacle.

  ‘We must be getting close,’ he sa
id at last, not for the first time, and Vex nodded.

  ‘I believe so,’ he agreed. ‘The degree of illumination is beginning to grow.’

  Now that he came to mention it, Horst realised that his colleague was right, but chilled and exhausted as he had been, the fact hadn’t registered with him before. Just as his eyes had adjusted slowly to the gathering darkness as they’d descended, they were adjusting again to the growing brightness ahead of them, where a more intense light shone around an outcropping of rock. ‘What is it?’ he whispered, wiping the sheen of moisture from his bolt pistol as best he could.

  ‘Judging by the refraction patterns and the echoes,’ Vex said, ‘I would conclude that it’s a cavern of some kind.’ He drew his autopistol, and blessed it quietly under his breath. ‘Whatever we’ve been looking for, I suspect we’ve just found it.’

  Icenholm, Sepheris Secundus

  099.993.M41

  ‘My lady Keira. You do us much honour,’ Viscount Adrin said, bowing formally as she entered the library of the Conclave of the Enlightened. Keira dipped a curtsey, as Drake had instructed her, the instinctive balance of the practiced assassin bestowing as much elegance on the unfamiliar movement as if she’d been practising it all her life.

  ‘Thank you for your kind invitation,’ she responded, assessing him carefully, amused to note that he was taking in every detail of her personal appearance just as avidly as Drake had done back at the villa. That thought reminded her uncomfortably of their conversation, and she forced the memory aside with a flare of irritation. The idea that she could be harbouring some kind of affection for Mordechai was absurd, she would surely have known if she was, but the Guardsman’s words had embedded themselves like thorns in her mind, refusing to be dislodged however much she scratched at them.

  This was no time to be distracted, she told herself firmly, smiling at her host, and taking refuge in the dispassionate analysis of what could be a potential target.

  Adrin was younger than she’d expected, at least physically, although since someone of his status would have access to juvenat treatments that didn’t mean much. She knew he was in his early sixties chronologically, but he looked around half that age. As if he’s about Mordechai’s age, a treacherous thought whispered in her mind, before being slapped aside by the disciplines of duty. His hair was dark, like the arbitrator’s, but elaborately coiffured, falling in oiled ringlets around his shoulders, and his eyes were brown instead of blue. His features were regular, to the point where anyone more susceptible to such things than Keira might have thought of him as handsome, and he comported himself with an easy charm that the Redemptionist in her instinctively distrusted, but which was hard not to respond to nevertheless.

  Since the lady she was supposed to be would have taken him at face value, at least to begin with, Keira smiled and nodded at his quips, and tried to avert her eyes as unobtrusively as possible from the indecent tightness of his dark green hose. His shirt was mercifully loose fitting, but open at the neck to reveal a well-muscled torso, the paler green silk of the chemise shot through with streaks of white.

  ‘We evidently have a taste for certain colours in common,’ Adrin said, holding out a hand into which a servant placed a glass of some local wine. Keira accepted one too, and, remembering Drake’s instructions, overrode the impulse to thank the girl. The drink was pleasant enough, though a trifle sweet for her palate, and she nodded.

  ‘Or my maid and your valet do,’ she said.

  ‘Quite.’ Adrin laughed, a little more spontaneously than mere politeness demanded. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue what to wear if Noblet didn’t lay it all out for me.’ An expression of exaggerated confusion crossed his face, and Keira found herself smiling without quite knowing why. ‘Come to think of it, I wouldn’t even know where to find a fresh cravat if I needed one. I think he keeps them in a drawer somewhere.’

  ‘That’s the usual procedure, I believe,’ Keira agreed, wandering over to the bookshelves. Night had fallen completely, and the great room was lit by chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, their level of illumination precisely calculated to give enough light to read comfortably by without being glaring or harsh. Beyond the glass wall the city glittered, light bouncing from a million facets, bathing everything in an aurora of shimmering radiance.

  Spotting one of the titles Vex had briefed her about, she extracted it from the shelf. ‘Oh, you have Philemon’s Comedia Theologica.’ She opened the heavy volume, and flipped a couple of pages. ‘With the Grobius illuminations.’ She snapped the book shut, and replaced it on the shelf. ‘And the Haldenbruk excisions, unfortunately.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s the only edition we’ve got,’ Adrin said, looking at her with a vague air of bafflement. ‘The unexpurgated text is almost impossible to come by.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Keira drank a little more of the sickly wine, finding it increasingly cloying with every sip. ‘The missing passages aren’t really crucial to his argument, and some of them are didactic in the extreme. I just prefer to work from a complete text whenever I can.’

  ‘You’ve read the full version?’ Adrin seemed more surprised than ever. ‘Wherever did you manage to find one?’

  ‘In the Lucid Palace, of all places.’ Keira adopted a slightly affected air of self-satisfaction. ‘I was doing some cataloguing there, just as a small favour to Marius, you understand, and stumbled across an original copy. Judging by the amount of dust on the spine, no one had even looked at it since it was published.’ For a moment she wondered if dropping the Sector Governor’s name, and implying that they were acquainted, had been overplaying her hand, but Adrin seemed hardly to have noticed.

  ‘I thought the missing passages were a bit… you know.’ He lowered his voice, like a prudish gossip about to discuss some intimate illness. ‘Heretical.’

  ‘Not really,’ Keira said blandly. ‘Not quite in tune with the current orthodoxy, I’ll grant you, but then the Ecclesiarchy never quite seems to make up its mind what that is anyway. There seem to be as many One True Paths to the Emperor as there are priests.’

  ‘You’re not afraid to speak your mind, are you?’ Adrin asked, sounding a little awestruck.

  Keira shrugged. ‘When you get to my age,’ she said, remembering that she was supposed to be over a century old, ‘you find that it saves a lot of time.’ The irony of trying to seem older and more experienced than a man three times her age, who undoubtedly believed that her genuine youth was as artificially maintained as his own, suddenly struck her. Her face must have remained straight, though, because Adrin was nodding, a smile on his face.

  ‘I rather gathered that from your response to my message,’ he said. ‘The poor fellow was quite put out. His family has been in the Guild of Heralds since the Gorgonid was just a couple of serfs with a spade, apparently, and no one’s ever been quite so cavalier about the correct forms of address before.’

  ‘I’m sorry if my reply struck you as overly blunt,’ Keira said, managing to sound more irritated than contrite, ‘but I’m not used to all this formality. We’re a bit more straightforward about things on Scintilla.’

  ‘I know. You have voxes, I hear.’ Adrin smiled, intercepting a tray of canapés as a servant orbited past with it. Keira took one too, biting into a small salty cracker covered in something the consistency of lube gel, which smelled faintly of fish guts. Under the pretext of examining the bookshelves again she turned away, slipping the remains of the snack between two volumes on the history of a local noble house she’d never heard of, and selected another title she recognised from the list Vex had given her. ‘What else has caught your fancy?’

  ‘Typhius. The Lamentations.’ She flicked through the pages in a desultory fashion. ‘Rather a favourite of mine, I must confess. All the exuberance of Philemon, but with none of the concomitant vulgarity.’

  ‘But rather less controversial,’ Adrin said easily.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why so few commentators seem to take him seriously any more,’ Keira said,
returning the book to its place, and handing her empty wine glass to another passing servant. ‘He’s seen as more orthodox, less challenging to the accepted order of things.’

  ‘You sound as if you disagree,’ Adrin said.

  ‘I do. His more popular works fall quite clearly into the mainstream, that’s beyond dispute, but some of his monographs push the boundaries of what was considered acceptable even during the age of apostasy.’ She shrugged. ‘Needless to say those are not particularly easy to find, but they are well worth the effort of seeking out.’

  ‘Perhaps to someone in your field of endeavour,’ Adrin said blandly. ‘I doubt that I’d find much I could understand in any of them.’ He gestured towards the main door of the library. ‘If you would care to continue our discussion over supper, I’ve taken the liberty of informing the dining room that I’m expecting a guest this evening.’

  ‘How very thoughtful,’ Keira said, taking his proffered arm in the manner Drake had tried to show her earlier. ‘But enough about me. I’m sure a man like you must have some fascinating lines of research under way.’

  ‘You flatter me, lady,’ Adrin said, leading her across the opulent entrance hall towards the dining room, from which both appetising aromas and the murmur of conversation could be heard, ‘but I spend so much time on administrative trivia that I have little time for any enquiries of my own.’

  ‘Nevertheless, you must have some particular areas of interest,’ Keira persisted, as another of the ubiquitous servants pulled a chair away from a table containing two place settings to allow her to sit. As she did so she glanced around at the other occupied tables, where half a dozen or so small groups of men and women were chatting idly over their meals. Most were richly dressed, flaunting their aristocratic status as gaudily as possible, although she was faintly surprised to note the plainer robes of Administratum adepts on a couple of the diners, and an elderly ecclesiarch talking earnestly with a couple of young fops in the corner. By and large, though, the simplicity of her own dress, which Lilith had offset with a single violet pendant on a gold chain, echoing the shade of her hair, and Adrin’s restrained ensemble, set them apart from the others with their air of understated refinement.