Ravenor Read online

  The other member of the gang sat down next to him. His name was Frauka, and there was something weird about him. Every time Zael got near him, his head started to hurt. And Frauka smoked all the time.

  ‘Something the matter?’ Frauka said, exhaling lho-smoke through his nostrils.

  Zael shook his head.

  The smoke smelled pretty good, actually. It reminded Zael of the drink-clubs in the stacks. It had been days now since he’d taken a hit of anything. He’d been really witchy-twitchy for a while, but he was better now. He wouldn’t have said no to a flect, just a little look, but he didn’t crave one. He had the distinct feeling that The Chair had done something to his head. Nothing bad, just… eased it. Cradled it. Taken out the sting.

  The Chair could do that. It wouldn’t surprise Zael to find out that The Chair could do anything. He really wanted to know what was inside that smooth, matt-black form. He didn’t even know what an inquisitor was, not actually, although he knew that everyone he’d ever known got terrified at the mention of the word.

  The Chair didn’t seem all that terrifying to Zael. Not like Kys, or Mathuin, or the guy. The Chair was more like what Zael imagined the God-Emperor to be. Quiet, faceless, potent, benign.

  Or maybe that was just something else The Chair was doing to his mind.

  Zael looked down the companionway towards the forward seats of the flier’s main compartments, and wondered about the others. The newcomers. One, haggard and blood-flecked, sat on his own, his chain binders anchored to a seat restraint. Zael knew he was called Duboe, and had witnessed the final moments of his apprehension in the Carnivora. That had been another first. Zael had never been to the big circus before.

  Zael wondered what Duboe had done. He certainly felt for him. With Kys and Thonius and Mathuin around, Zael sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to be a prisoner here.

  Then there were the other three. They kept themselves apart from The Chair’s gang. They were dressed in identical suits of fine-quality grey cloth, but they were far from identical themselves. One was very large, bigger than the guy even, his muscles stretching at the cut of his jacket. His skin was dark, though not as black as Mathuin’s, and he had a little trimmed moustache line and clan-style piercings in his left eyebrow. His black hair was short and downy. There was something primitive about him, something coarse. He was very still. He reminded Zael of picts he’d seen, picts of huge lizards sun-basking on rocks, stock-still and blank for days at a time, jaws agape. Waiting, waiting to explode into fury and eat something alive.

  The woman seemed to be in charge. Her name was Madsen – Zael had heard her introduced to Kara. She was white-blonde and slender, with a hard, pinched face that would have been really pretty if it hadn’t been so tight. She spoke to her two companions now and then in a low voice that no one could overhear.

  The other one, the stringy man, was more alarming. Zael had an impression of a balding, blond creep, but for some reason, every time he looked at him, Zael saw nothing but a sort of blur. Like the creep wasn’t really there. Or like he was twice, and the two-ness of him was making him appear distorted.

  Once during the flight, when Zael was looking at the creep, the creep had turned and looked back at Zael, as if feeling his eyes on him. The creep’s stare was like hot wires. It said look someplace else, you little freak.

  Zael had looked away fast.

  He peered out of the window. The flier shivered as it climbed. Zael suddenly saw spots of fire in the dark and cried out.

  ‘What the frig’s the matter?’ Frauka asked him, petulantly.

  Zael pointed.

  ‘Stars. They’re stars. Haven’t you ever seen stars before?’

  Another first.

  He’d expected some grand fanfare and ceremony – this was a starship after all. But there was simply a thud, and a scraping sound and the flier’s hatch had opened to reveal another hatch, which had opened to display a dank, greasy metal corridor.

  And everyone had just got up and got out.

  Zael felt cheated. He’d wanted to see the starship and understand where he was going. This oily deckhall could have been the back stacks of J, anywhere.

  The Chair slid past him.

  +Find our friend a cabin and make him comfortable.+

  The guy nodded, and turned back to Zael.

  ‘Come here, boy. I’ve got to–’

  ‘Find me a cabin and make me comfortable,’ Zael said.

  The guy faltered. ‘Yeah… that’s right.’

  Zael was busy lifting his feet one at a time and putting them back down on the deck grille. The strange, fluid sensation made him smile.

  ‘What?’ asked the guy.

  ‘Weird,’ said Zael.

  ‘A-G,’ said the guy.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The ship’s artificial gravity. You’ll get used to it.’

  ‘What’s… gravity?’

  A recording of sweeping orchestral music was being broadcast at high volume across the bridge of the Hinterlight. Somebody or other’s Ninth Symphony, laden with strings, brass and kettle drums. It was one of shipmistress’s idiosyncrasies, a little ritual. She liked to break orbit with something appropriately stirring blasting from the vox. Besides, she claimed, it helped the Navigators compose the course.

  ‘Down three,’ she said as she saw me enter the bridge by the after hatch. The music muted appropriately.

  ‘Thonius tells me we’re off to Flint.’

  ‘To begin with,’ I replied, using the voxponder. I did this out of respect. For some reason, she had always objected to me mind-speaking. ‘It could be a long run. Right up the lane to Lenk, if needs be.’

  Cynia Preest pouted. ‘No bugger goes to Lenk any more.’

  ‘Some buggers do. The sort I’m after. I hope to catch them before that. Certainly before they hit Lucky Space.’

  She tilted back her head and laughed. Then stopped. Then looked at me with narrowed eyes. ‘You’re joking?’

  ‘It’s been known, but not at the moment.’

  ‘Shit!’ she said, and turned away and then said it again, with equal vehemence. ‘Shit! I am not… categorically not… going to take my darling into Lucky Space.’

  ‘Cynia…’

  ‘No. No way, Gideon. Flint’s bad enough. It’s only borderline Imperial these days. But Lucky Space? I am not taking the Hinterlight out of sub territory, especially not there. There are pirates out there, dark kin, brigands, death worlds, rip-worlds–’

  ‘The people we’re shadowing have a particular interest in rip-worlds,’ I said.

  ‘Well, lucky them. They can enjoy them on their own.’

  She walked away from me, cussing my parentage, and leaned over the pilot console, resting her hands on the spoked brass wheel. I knew what this was about: Majeskus. I’d enjoyed a fine working relationship with Shipmistress Preest until Majeskus. God-Emperor, it still haunted me. I have never – will never – forget the desperate voices of Will Tallowhand, Eleena Koi and Norah Santjack as they crackled over the vox in the moments before their doom. Nor have I forgotten the damage done to the Hinterlight. How many was it? Fifty, sixty per cent of the crew? May the Throne of Terra keep the soul of Zygmunt Molotch burning in agony forever. Sometimes I wished that bastard was still alive so I could kill him all over again.

  But he was dead, incinerated on Zenta Malhyde, and my friends and allies were dead and gone also. And that was then, and this was now.

  Cynia had ramped the volume up to full again. The bridge space shook with symphonic pomp.

  ‘Cynia!’

  She pretended she hadn’t heard.

  +Cynia.+

  She snapped round to glare at me. ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m bloody unhappy about this.’

  +Cynia…+

  ‘Don’t mind-chat me! Talk like a regular human, or get off my deck!’

  ‘As you wish,’ I said, switching back to voxponder.

  ‘Better,’ said Cynia Preest, and dimmed the musi
c. ‘Throne, Gideon, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘It’ll happen again, won’t it? Sooner or later. We’ll meet a bastard tougher than us and he’ll hurt us bad.’

  ‘Zygmunt Molotch was a genius-psychotic. A Cognitae-schooled freak. An aberration. Yes, he hurt us. More than hurt us. But he’s gone now. Get Harlon up here and he’ll relish telling you how he flamed Molotch’s arse on Malhyde. We’re after safer game, Cynia. Crim-smugglers who’ve hooked up with game agents. They scour the rip-worlds and everything else out there for viable circus beasts. There’s very little risk.’

  Mistress Preest scowled at me. ‘That’s what you said last time.’

  She turned back to the helm position and studied it for a while. The Hinterlight’s bridge was surprisingly small for such a large vessel, essentially because it had been rebuilt in drydock after the Majeskus incident. Six months’ expensive reconstruction, courtesy of the Guild Mechanicus, who’d only agreed to touch a rogue trader because of the influence I’d brought to bear through the Ordos Helican. A compact strategium well contained the actuality sphere. Behind it, a double hatch let into the shipmistress’s ready room. Fore of the strategium, a simple, sloping bay contained the helm stations and the Navigator’s socket. Bridge crew and servitors scurried round. Oliphant Twu of the Navis Nobilite was already plugged in to that socket, his lids shut, reading ghost stars on all three retinas.

  ‘I have a course, mistress,’ he reported in a slow, lazy voice. ‘Flint. To orbit, four days.’

  ‘Hold it ready, if you please, Navigator.’ Preest looked at me.

  ‘Cynia…’

  ‘Don’t you bloody “Cynia” me!’ Cynia Preest exploded again. ‘Be at your beck and call, fine! Carry you and your band of killers around the known stars, fine! But this…’

  Cynia Preest was mistress of the Hinterlight, and my pilot. She was two hundred and eighty-four years old, although she always gave her age as ‘twenty-seven and a bit’. Clad in a gold-suede bodyglove and red velvet robes, she was an imposing figure, womanly but robust, and just now becoming stocky and matronly. She had cropped, bleached hair, heavy make-up shadow over her eyes, and favoured excessive dangling earrings. I always thought she could have passed as a tavern hostess or a smile-girl madam, but for the tracery of fibre-wire inlay that ran down the left side of her face.

  ‘Lucky Space…’ She spat out the words.

  Elman Halstrom, Cynia’s deputy and first officer, had wandered over to join us while we had been talking. Modestly built, with a genial, heart-shaped face and slightly down-turned, put-upon eyes, he was a Navy veteran, and always immaculate. His thinning black hair was oiled back fleet-fashion, and he wore the formal uniform of Battlefleet Scarus, though every insignia, pip and crest had been removed from it. Even the embossed buttons had been replaced by plain bone disks. I understood he’d been a captain once, though I knew nothing about the circumstances surrounding his exit from service. Cynia had engaged him – like so many of the crew – after Majeskus.

  ‘We are fit and running free,’ he reported. Halstrom was precise and clipped when it came to duties, a legacy of his years in the Fleet, but he was not beyond informality. I liked him. He could yarn a good tale and deliver a fine jest. ‘Eustis Majoris control has cleared us for system exit. Course is ready and held. Enginarium reports jump speed at your discretion.’

  Preest nodded.

  ‘I couldn’t help but overhear,’ he added. ‘She’s mentioned brigands, I take it?’

  ‘She has,’ I said.

  There was a twitch of a smile on his small, rounded mouth. ‘Dark kin? Death-worlds?’

  ‘All noted, Mr Halstrom. The shipmistress has made all her objections abundantly clear. I will endeavour to make sure our voyage has to go no further than Flint.’

  ‘Well then, that’s excellent.’ Halstrom glanced at Cynia. ‘Mistress?’

  Preest glared at me again, and then walked away to the main throne in the centre of the bridge. There she sat down and oversaw final preparation for warp translation.

  ‘A word, if I may?’ Halstrom said to me. He leaned over as he spoke, as if my three-sixty degree audio receptors wouldn’t catch his confidence somehow, as if craning for an ear to whisper into. The gesture touched me.

  ‘Of course.’

  We left the bridge and proceeded down the midships companionway. Halstrom walked slowly by my side.

  ‘I understand we have guests?’

  As first officer, it fell to Halstrom to supervise matters of shipboard security.

  ‘We have. I’ve told them to make themselves available for induction interviews at your convenience. For now, they’re restricted at my instruction to the quarters I’ve provided in my deck.’

  ‘Do you want them to remain restricted?’

  ‘Not unduly. Not so that we appear rude. Standard prohibitions, I think… no access to the enginarium, the arsenal or any private cabins. I feel it is up to you and the mistress to decide what rules you set for them.’

  ‘I see. And, though I will interview them, what can you tell me about them?’

  ‘Not a great deal at this stage. They are agents of an official department known as the Ministry of Sub-sector Trade, and answer directly to the lord governor sub-sector himself. They have influence and power. A mis-handled situation could cause a rift between the ordos and sub-sector government.’

  ‘We wouldn’t want that,’ smiled Halstrom. ‘And might a situation arise that could result in mis-handling?’

  ‘It might,’ I replied. ‘One of them is a potent psyker. I suggest you have Frauka present when you interview him.’

  Halstrom was silent for a moment. We had almost reached the end of the long companionway. Ahead, it split into the through-deck corridors and the main dorsal elevator bank.

  ‘Obviously,’ Halstrom said, then, gently, ‘I know only what you and the shipmistress care to tell me about your work, on Eustis Majoris. But I know enough to understand that you deliberately conducted your operation on the planet clandestinely. As it was explained to me, you felt you could trust no one. Not even the authorities.’

  ‘That’s still the case, Mr Halstrom. I’m attempting to locate the source of a material that is undoubtedly warp-tainted. It is used as… as a drug, essentially. Recreational. But it is no narcotic. It is heretical. To obtain it, and smuggle it onto the sub-sector capital world and elsewhere… that requires friends in high places, I believe. So I tried to keep my business quiet. Unfortunately, fate decided otherwise.’

  ‘So these guests are here under sufferance?’

  ‘Quite so. They’re here because it is diplomatic to cooperate with them, not because I trust them.’

  A buzzer sounded and amber lamps began to flash along the length of the corridor. Halstrom stepped back and took careful, experienced hold of the nearest handrail, and I cut my chair’s lift and maglocked it down to the deck. There was a slight tremor, then twenty seconds of vibration combined with a flickering, time-lapse impairment to my vision. The rumble of the main drives grew louder.

  Then the buzzer stopped and the lights ceased. We had passed the translation point. Now the Hinterlight was travelling at something close to maximum velocity, outside realspace, traversing the treacherous oceans of the warp.

  ‘I should return to my duties,’ said Halstrom, releasing the handrail. ‘Thank you, inquisitor, for your time and candour.’

  ‘Mr Halstrom?’ He paused and returned to me.

  ‘How long will I keep Preest?’ I asked.

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘I can’t answer that, sir. Only the shipmistress decides. It would not be out of turn for me to mention that she has complained to me many times about the risks involved in continuing to act as your contracted conveyor. She is scared. That business six years ago. It’s fair to say it destroyed her faith in you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. The toneless voxponder did nothing to convey the sadness in my words. ‘Cynia and the Hinterlight have been
part of my operation for… well, it will be thirty years next spring. I can’t bear the idea of sundering that arrangement, or the idea of having to find another shipmaster to trust. But the last few years have been difficult. She’s spoken of breaking our contract?’

  He shook his head. ‘Mistress Preest would never be so unprofessional. But her agreement with you and the ordos is up for renewal on the anniversary. She has mentioned that it might be time for a change. Time to return to free trading, perhaps in the Ophidian sub, where merchant business is said to be booming. Of course, she will miss the security of the ordos stipend and retainer fees.’

  ‘But not the danger?’

  ‘Not the danger, no, sir.’

  ‘I understand how you feel,’ I said, turning my chair towards the nearest elevator.

  ‘Me, sir? No, sir,’ he said. ‘The mistress has been hurt once, and perhaps has lost her nerve. I can sympathise. But a little run up into Lucky Space, hunting for heretics? That sounds rather exciting to me.’

  The cabin, badly lit and untidy, was pretty much the only place in the Imperium Harlon Nayl thought of as home. In a long, bruising life extended by juvenat treatments – Nayl was just over a hundred, standard, but looked a robust late-thirties – he had known a number of homes. Loki – cold, hard, unforgiving Loki – was his birthworld, but he’d outstayed his welcome there pretty much the same day he decided to follow his brothers into the bounty-hunting business. Loki hadn’t been home for a long time now. He’d wandered for some years, not so much in pursuit of work but because pursuit was his work. Then he’d crossed paths with an inquisitor called Eisenhorn.

  As part of Eisenhorn’s band, he’d had residence in a number of places, and remembered most fondly the Ocean House of Thracian Primaris and Eisenhorn’s estate, Spaeton House, on Gudrun. Both of those were memories now, just as Eisenhorn himself was. No one had seen the inquisitor since the affair on Ghul back in the eighties. Nayl often wondered if Eisenhorn was dead. So many of them were from that time… Fischig, Aemos, Tobias Maxilla, Eleena Koi. That’s what this life did; it killed you, sooner or later. Serve the ordos of the Holy Inquisition, and eventually that duty got you dead.