The Magos Read online

  ‘We haven’t seen anybody except you,’ said Garofar.

  Macks adjusted her collar vox.

  ‘Nayl, this is Macks? Do you copy? Cronyl? Are you reading me? This is Macks.’

  She looked at Jaff.

  ‘The vox is dead,’ she said.

  ‘The frequency spectrum may be different here,’ said Jaff.

  ‘How do you know that?’ asked Garofar.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Jaff. ‘It’s just an educated guess.’

  She turned and looked down the next set of metal steps. It descended to another platform. Other walkways branched off it. Steps led up to higher platforms, obscured by the humming machinery.

  She looked at Macks.

  ‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘I’ll scout along here.’

  ‘We should stay together,’ said Macks.

  ‘I’ll be quick,’ said Jaff. ‘Stay here, and take a moment to get yourselves together. I’m going to need you to be able to focus.’

  She turned and hurried silently down the metal steps. They watched her cross the lower platform then disappear from view behind slowly circling brass gears the size of banquet tables.

  ‘How long do we wait?’ asked Garofar.

  ‘Until she comes back,’ replied Macks.

  ‘What if she doesn’t?’ he said.

  ‘Let’s not get pessimistic,’ said Macks. She tilted her head towards Edde, who was twitching with unease, unable to stand still. Macks knew how the deputy felt. She wasn’t far off a panic attack herself. Her hands were shaking badly.

  Garofar took the hint.

  ‘Come on, Edde,’ he said, trying to sound reassuring. ‘We’re going to be all right.’ He went to put his arm around her shoulders.

  There was a sharp, wet pop, like a water bottle bursting. Garofar’s face was suddenly speckled with liquid. Edde sagged into him, heavy and limp.

  He tried to hold her up. Her head lolled back, and a huge quantity of blood welled out of a hole in her throat.

  ‘Shooter!’ he yelled.

  The second shot hit him in the ribs, knocking him aside. Garofar and Edde crashed over onto the platform together.

  Macks dropped to her knees, her riotgun raised. There was no way in hell to tell where the shots had come from.

  ‘Drop it!’ a voice boomed.

  ‘Magistratum!’ Macks yelled, her weapon up to her cheek, hunting. ‘Go screw yourself!’

  ‘Drop it,’ the voice repeated. ‘The male is only wounded. He could be saved. But not if you resist.’

  Macks glanced frantically at Garofar. He was sprawled on his back, blood bubbles popping as he opened and closed his mouth in silent shock.

  Breathing hard, Macks slowly lowered the riotgun. She put it on the metal deck and raised her hands to show they were empty. Then she moved quickly to Garofar’s side, and clamped her palms over the chest wound. There was blood everywhere. It was running through the platform mesh underneath Garofar, catching the light as it spattered away into the darkness.

  Two people appeared, moving up the lower gantry towards Macks. One was a heavyset, bearded male in a chain-mesh combat jacket. The other was a slighter figure, a woman with tightly cropped red hair. Both were covering Macks with suppressed autorifles. Two more, both male, approached from the other direction. One was overweight and jowly, with thin grey hair. He carried an assault lasrifle with a modified scope and combat grips. The other was a very tall, thin man with neck and cheek tattoos. He covered Macks with a pair of laspistols.

  The bearded man came up the steps to Macks as the other three kept back, covering her. He was swarthy, with jet-black hair. His piercing eyes were an odd, violet colour. He looked down at Macks.

  ‘For Throne’s sake! Help him!’ Macks yelled, her hands locked flat over the wound in Garofar’s torso.

  ‘He’s done for,’ called the overweight man, edging closer, his weapon aimed. ‘You can see that. But she’s intact enough.’

  ‘You said you’d help him,’ Macks pleaded.

  ‘I say all sorts of things,’ replied the bearded man. ‘Blayg is right. He’s done for.’

  ‘No! Get a bloody med kit!’ cried Macks.

  The man with the violet eyes sighed. He brought up his autorifle and puffed two noise-limited shots into Garofar’s head.

  Macks screamed and launched herself at the bearded man, clawing with blood-soaked hands.

  He snapped his autorifle around like a club and met her face with the stock.

  Nayl opened the door and looked out.

  ‘You think you can be quiet now, magos?’ he whispered over his shoulder.

  ‘Yes,’ said Drusher. He’d calmed down a little.

  ‘Follow me,’ said Nayl. ‘Stick with me. Do as I tell you.’

  Drusher nodded.

  Nayl looked at him, eyes narrowed.

  ‘Say it, quietly but clearly,’ he said. ‘I need to know where you are. I won’t be looking at you.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Drusher. ‘Yes.’

  Nayl looked at Drusher for a moment, as if gauging how far he could trust him to behave. Then he appeared to make his mind up.

  ‘Follow,’ he whispered.

  With the rifle up against his cheek, Nayl opened the door wider. Then, he switched his hand to the foregrip and edged out, panning the powerful assault weapon from side to side. Drusher followed him.

  The door led into a long, high hallway. The walls were the same, seamless white stone as the room, the floor the same green marble. It was gloomy, and there was a constant, distant humming noise. Murky light seeped in through high window lights. The proportions of the hallway were odd. It was wide enough for three men to walk together, side by side, but the ceiling was so high, it felt narrow and confined. Drusher guessed the ceiling was five or six metres up. It seemed a curious choice, so much wasted space above head height. Despite the open air above him, he felt claustrophobic, oppressed by the blank, chalk-white walls.

  Why build a corridor that shape? Was its grand architecture supposed to impress and intimidate? Then why so plain and austere? He was frankly glad the window lights were too high for him to see out of them.

  His old adversary, imagination, decided to make mischief. The thought came to him that this was a very narrow corridor. A single-file passageway for very tall people. People so tall, they could see out of the high windows, because they would be at head height. And those tall people therefore wouldn’t be people at all…

  ‘All right?’ Nayl asked.

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Drusher.

  ‘You started breathing funny again,’ Nayl noted. He wasn’t looking at Drusher. He was prowling along the hallway, hunched, weapon aimed ready to fire. Drusher wondered why Nayl had chosen to go right instead of left. Both directions looked identical: the slender hallway advancing away as far as he could see.

  ‘Magos?’ Nayl prompted.

  ‘Yes,’ said Drusher. ‘I’m fine.’

  He wanted to ask about the window. He wanted to ask Nayl about what he had seen through it. But it clearly wasn’t the time.

  Nayl had looked through the window too. He had made no comment, as if the view had been what he had expected to see, or as if he’d seen it before. Drusher doubted both options. During their brief acquaintance, Drusher had come to know Nayl as a man who rarely registered any kind of reaction.

  There was another door a few metres down on the right. Like the first, it was made of some kind of dense, pale wood, polished until it gleamed. The handle was silver.

  ‘Stay with me,’ said Nayl.

  ‘Yes,’ said Drusher.

  ‘First priority is to find the others,’ said Nayl. ‘I think they’ll be close. I think our positions will be relative to the ones we were in when we…’

  He paused, thinking of the right word. Drusher was guessing ‘left’.

  ‘…were still in the woods,’ Nayl finished.

  ‘And if they aren’t?’ he asked.

  ‘Then I’ve got even less to go on than I hop
ed,’ said Nayl.

  He reached the door. He listened at it for a moment, then turned the handle and let it swing open with a prod of his toe. He stepped in.

  Drusher followed.

  The room was identical to the one they had first found themselves in. A light Drusher now knew was not the sun, shone through stained glass-lancets. There was no cot, just four wooden chairs, arranged in a square with their backs together. There were marks made in blue chalk around the feet of the chairs, meaningless scribbles that were somehow unpleasant to look at.

  Drusher found himself staring at them. One of the chairs was slightly out of alignment with the others and, driven by an obsessive compulsive urge, he reached out to straighten it.

  Nayl’s big hand clamped around his wrist.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ he said firmly. ‘No matter how much you want to.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Drusher clearly. He had no idea why he’d felt so compelled.

  He glanced fitfully at the stained-glass windows. Like the ones in the previous room, their pattern appeared random, purely decorative. Surely the point of stained glass was to make a picture? The coloured panes were used to assemble an image: a saint, perhaps, or something symbolic. This was just a patchwork of green and red and gold shapes, fixed together with leading.

  Except it wasn’t. He stared. There were recognisable forms there. Figures. Elongated figures, swaying, with long intertwined limbs that–

  ‘Don’t look at the windows either,’ said Nayl.

  ‘Yes,’ said Drusher, looking at the plain white wall instead.

  ‘They’re not here,’ said Nayl. ‘They should have been on the other side of this wall if…’

  He sighed, as though it were too much effort to finish, or too distressing to explain the context.

  ‘What does that mean, Nayl?’ Drusher asked.

  ‘It means we didn’t bi-locate together,’ said Nayl. ‘Or we did, and we didn’t arrive in our relative positions. Or we’re not time synchronised. Or–’

  He glanced at Drusher.

  ‘I’m just upsetting you now, aren’t I?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ said Drusher.

  ‘You sure? You made a noise. A sort of groan.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Drusher.

  ‘I think you did.’

  ‘I think I’d know.’

  ‘I don’t think you would.’

  ‘Nayl–’

  ‘All right,’ said Nayl. ‘This is a difficult experience, and your mind’s not really focused yet. I can see the lost look in your eyes. That’s all right. You’ll get your bearings. But it’s possible you groaned without knowing it, because this is all too much to take in.’

  ‘Are you finding it a difficult experience?’ asked Drusher.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Nayl.

  ‘Then you’re hiding that well. Has this happened to you before?’

  ‘Not this exactly, no.’

  ‘Then something like it?’

  ‘I’ve had experiences,’ said Nayl. ‘Things like this that would scare you bloodless. But not this exactly.’

  ‘How do you deal with it?’

  ‘I’ve been dealing with it for years,’ said Nayl. ‘One thing I’ve learned, if you don’t deal with these kinds of situations quickly, you’re no good to anyone, including yourself.’

  ‘Insane adventures…’ murmured Drusher.

  ‘Exactly, magos.’

  ‘You weren’t lying.’

  ‘No,’ said Nayl. He flashed a quick smile that Drusher took as an attempt to be supportive. ‘For your sake, Drusher, I wish I had been.’

  ‘What do we do, Nayl?’ Drusher asked.

  ‘We keep looking. We keep looking for the others. It’s about all we can do.’

  ‘What about… Can you not say the word again? The word Eisenhorn said? Can’t you take us back?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Nayl. ‘I don’t know what he said either. Enuncia is beyond my pay-grade.’

  Drusher breathed heavily and nodded. He walked over to the windows.

  ‘What are you doing? Magos?’

  Drusher stood on tiptoe and looked through the stained glass. Nayl pulled him back.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘It made you cry last time.’

  ‘That’s why I have to,’ said Drusher. ‘You’re right. I’m lost. My mind’s all over the place. I’m not really coping. Which means I’m no use to you at all. The sooner I face up to reality and get it together, the better. Think of this as… aversion therapy.’

  Nayl frowned, then let go of him. Drusher stood back up on his toes.

  He saw the world outside through the coloured glass of the old window. No sunlit woodland, no forest glade, no blue skies, no cobalt edge of the Karanine ridge in the afternoon haze. No Gershom.

  Outside was a grey desert. Dunes of dust stretched away as far as he could see, broken by outcrops of rock that looked like the calcified vertebrae of long-dead, leviathan creatures. A thin wind lifted powder from the crests of the dunes, winnowing it into the air like sea spray.

  The sky was black and starless. A bone-white curve, like an immense tusk of light, rose from the horizon into the sky. It was a moon, or a close neighbour planet, rising in the sky in three-quarter shadow, impossibly close.

  The black void sky had one feature: a blue-white whorl that radiated the light he’d first taken to be the sun’s rays. The whorl was immense. A nebula, or some kind of stellar vortex, gleaming fiercely like the negative image of a black hole. Trailing arms of frosty light and energy clouds radiated from the heart of it.

  It looked to Drusher like a vast eye gazing back at him.

  Drusher let it look. He held its stare and returned it, unblinking.

  Then he lowered himself onto his heels and turned away from the window.

  ‘All right,’ he said to Nayl. ‘I have a little perspective now. I’ve got my head together.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Positive, Nayl. Lead on. Let’s find the others.’

  Nayl hesitated.

  ‘I only ask because… you groaned again.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Drusher.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you did. Involuntary I’m sure, but–’

  Drusher held up his hand sharply.

  Nayl had heard it too. A soft, stifled moan.

  ‘I told you it wasn’t me,’ Drusher said.

  ‘It came from the hallway,’ said Nayl. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Just calm the hell down and let me think,’ said Voriet.

  Deputy Cronyl glared at him. His face was flushed, and he looked set to throw a punch at the interrogator.

  ‘Please,’ said Voriet softly. ‘I know this is very distressing. I am fighting to process it myself.’

  ‘But how can we be here all of a sudden?’ Cronyl snarled.

  ‘Just give me a moment,’ said Voriet. ‘Just a moment…’

  He looked at the ancient machinery spinning in the twilight around them. Such an extraordinary device. Could it be? Could the rumours, the uncorroborated intelligence… Could they all have been true?

  The heretic scum actually possessed this thing, and it was working?

  This, he decided with a wince of grief, this secret was why Thea had died.

  ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ he said, turning to Cronyl.

  Something slammed into Cronyl and flipped him. The deputy landed on the metal deck with a yowl of pain. A savage spin-kick connected with Voriet’s jaw, snapping him off his feet.

  The attacker was a woman with severely cropped, red hair. Cronyl tried to rise, but she jerked down with a snarl and put a punch dagger through his spine. The deputy collapsed on his face, his body twitching, his last exhalation a long, slow, choking wheeze.

  Voriet rolled, dragging out his Tronsvasse automatic. The woman kicked and deflected his aim. His shot went wide, the report echoing around in the darkness.

  Voriet scrambled backwards on his rear, trying to re-aim. She lunged in
and clamped his wrist with her left hand, twisting the pistol aside. He kicked out and took her legs away. She rolled as she fell, jerking his clamped wrist into over-rotation. Voriet gasped in pain. She locked her other hand around the bicep of his pinned arm and pivoted, hauling him head first over her and breaking his arm at the same time.

  Voriet howled. The woman sprang up and stamped on his outstretched hand, breaking his fingers around the grip of the pistol. She kicked the gun clear of his useless hand.

  He swung at her with his left fist, trying to ignore the overload of pain. She blocked the blow and drove a beak fist into his throat.

  Voriet fell back, choking, eyes wide, unable to breathe, unable to rise.

  The red-haired woman straddled his chest and stared down at him. She rested her beak fist against his brow.

  ‘Submit,’ she whispered, ‘and the remains of your life will have a purpose.’

  Voriet couldn’t speak. He spat instead. Blood and spittle hit her cheek.

  She hammer-tapped her beak fist against his forehead and bounced the back of his skull off the metal deck.

  They followed the hallway to its far end. Nayl ignored other doors as they passed them. The sound was coming from up ahead.

  As they approached, it grew louder. The constant background hum grew louder too. It wasn’t a moaning. It wasn’t someone in pain or distress. It sounded more like a voice unable to articulate. A voice that wanted to speak, and was trying to speak, but which had never learned any words.

  Drusher thought of Macks, and the way she had been reduced to inarticulate gasps by the thing in the kitchen passage. Fear had done that to her. She had briefly been reduced to wordless terror by something that defied her mind’s ability to process it. But Germaine Macks was clever and sharp-witted, and she had a considerable and sometimes salty vocabulary.

  This sound had a quite different quality. It was a human voice. It wasn’t groping in fear, trying to find some words, the way Macks had been. It was vocalising in despair trying to make words.

  Drusher took a moment to steady himself. Just thinking about Macks had made him upset. He wondered where she was. He wondered if he would see her again. He imagined her, wherever she was, being as scared now as she had been in the passageway.

  It was a thought he could scarcely bear.

  ‘Magos?’