Penitent Page 5

  Medea looked at me with mischief.

  ‘And how, my dear Beta, might we get hold of that?’

  I shrugged. ‘The way I got it in the first place,’ I said. ‘I’ll steal it.’

  ‘From Gideon?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I think you’re capable of great deeds, Beta, but that sounds unlikely.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it’s time I escaped the clutches of the cruel heretic and his minions who keep me imprisoned here, and fled back to the safety of the brave inquisitor who offered me salvation.’

  Medea laughed. I had always liked her laugh.

  ‘You would double on him?’ she asked. ‘Make pretence of turning loyalties?’

  ‘What is loyalty in this city?’ I asked. ‘Besides, it would be just another function. The playing of a role. I’ve done many, and I’m trained for it.’

  Medea shook her head. ‘Gideon would see through it in a second,’ she said. ‘He’d read it.’

  ‘Not in the mind of a null he wouldn’t,’ I replied.

  She thought about this. I took a bite from a piping hot roda.

  ‘Do not,’ she said, ‘attempt this. Not without consulting me or Gregor first.’

  When she had gone, I went to the rack and took down weapons – a salinter and a cutro – to drill for a while.

  ‘You are so like your other, little thing,’ said Cherubael.

  I turned and saw him. I think he might have been there all along. He was hovering, adrift, in the corner of the room with chains trailing from his twisted ankles, like a child’s lost balloon. He made a small and constant sound, a faint fizzing hum, like a fluorescent vapour bulb whose starter is beginning to burn out.

  ‘You mean my mother?’ I asked.

  ‘I know what I mean,’ he said. ‘Mother, other, what you will. You are brave and you are reckless, just like her. I liked her.’

  He grinned down at me, but then he always grinned. I don’t believe his stretched face could relax.

  ‘Did she like you?’ I asked, making practice swings in the air with the cutro.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘No one likes me.’

  His hanging chains shivered slightly.

  ‘Do you need something?’ I asked.

  ‘Many things,’ he said. ‘Things no one can give me. Freedom. Peace. Release. Liberty. A fresh-baked roda.’

  ‘You can have a roda,’ I said, gesturing to the plate Medea had left.

  Cherubael patted his tattooed, washboard belly with a taloned hand, and shook his head.

  ‘They don’t agree with me,’ he said. ‘Not with my… present constitution. The butter in the pastry flake gives me wind.’

  ‘Well, that would make you truly awful,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then… you are unoccupied?’ I asked, setting down the cutro and trying the salinter instead.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, drifting slightly. ‘I wait. Always wait. It is my lot. I wait for instructions, for tasks. I wait to be summoned and used. ­Meantimes, I drift and think.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘You don’t want to know, little thing.’

  ‘You’re saying you’re bored, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Always,’ he purred. ‘I have been bored forever. I have no idea how your kind wastes so much time given the brief spans of life allotted to you. Me, I’m always busy, always doing this and that. When I was free, I mean. When my time and bidding was my own.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ I told him.

  ‘I know.’

  I heard the chains shiver again, and saw him turn slowly to drift out of the room, a child’s lost balloon caught in a draught.

  ‘Goodbye then,’ I said.

  He paused and looked back at me. I knew he was an infinitely dangerous entity, though in our company he was regarded more as a strange pet. Both Medea and Harlon had intimated that, following the mission to Gershom, Eisenhorn’s command of Cherubael had become absolute, as though the daemonhost was entirely constrained by the inquisitor’s will. His apparent timidity made it easy to forget what a horror he was.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I remember something. I saw your man.’

  ‘My man?’

  ‘The other day when I was loose abroad on an errand. I saw him on the steps of Saint Nodens’ Undercroft in Ropeburn.’

  ‘What man do you mean, Cherubael?’

  He raised his right hand, and waved it with slow distraction.

  ‘The man. Your man. I’m not good at names. Render, is it?’

  ‘Renner? Renner Lightburn?’

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘The Curst boy. He begs there now. It’s become his patch. Poor fellow, with all his woes. I feel he is more damned than I am.’

  He looked at me. His eyes flashed.

  ‘That was a joke,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘You’re nearly getting the hang of them.’

  ‘Practice,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got plenty of time. Anyway, I thought you’d want to know. You were looking for him, weren’t you?’

  ‘Is he there still?’ I asked.

  ‘Now, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, daemonhost.’

  He tilted his head thoughtfully, and sniffed the air.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The gale had not eased, and rain was still washing the streets when I went out. It was early still. I told Medea where I was going, that a sighting had been made of Lightburn.

  She sighed. I could tell she thought it a bad idea to renew contact, but she also knew I was set upon it. She told me to be back by midnight.

  ‘What’s happening then?’ I asked.

  ‘With luck, some answers,’ she replied.

  I walked as far as Alohim Court, glad of my hooded overcloak. The rain was fierce, and the wind was lifting litter and tossing it about. Shutters banged on their hinges, and the signs of emporia squealed as they swung to and fro on their chains. The businesses were shut, and the streets were empty. It was past dawn, but the storm had cast the town like twilight, and the gloom refused to lift. This should have been the hour when the city woke up, emporia opened their doors, eating halls clattered with the bustle of breakfast service, and people shuffled off to work or devotion. I fancied that, for yet another day, the gales would keep citizens indoors, and most businesses closed for the duration.

  I had hoped to hail a fly at Alohim Court, but none were around, and the stand on the west side of the drenched square was vacant. The cabmen, lacking fares because of the weather, had retreated to the stable depot with their traps and flies and hansoms to brew caffeine, sit around the braziers and complain about lost income.

  Instead, I crossed beneath the viaduct at Hearthill Rise, braved the narrow lanes there with my head down, and reached the top of the Ropeburn Quarter in time to catch a tram down the hill of the avenue. The tramcar was as old as any in the city, painted blue and white, and strapped in bare brass. Its hinged pantograph collected voltaic power from the overhead lines, and somewhat spat and ­fizzled in the heavy rain. Inside, it was warm, and lit by lumen hoods above the seat backs. It should have been a busy commuter trolley, but I was one of only two or three passengers, all sodden and sorry for themselves, and the grumpy conductor didn’t speak as he took my coin and ratcheted a ticket from his machine.

  I watched the dead, black city go by through a window distorted by raindrops. The tram moaned and hummed its way with a slowly rising, slowly falling song, punctuated by the squeal of the rails.

  I wondered what I would say to Renner. How do you reunite with a person who has had all his memories of you stolen?

  CHAPTER 7

  Upon a day like night

  Of the poor breed known as the Curst, you should know they are penitents, shunned by the society of the city. They
are more properly known as ‘burdeners’, for they each carry the burden of great sins or crimes for which the Ecclesiarchy courts have damned them. The manner of their sin is marked upon their flesh in ink, and they are banished to live in the streets, surviving on charity, in order to spend the rest of their lives making atonement. This they do by offering aid to any in need, without thought for their own safety, so to defray their burdens. They may also take on the sins and crimes of others, absolving those persons of their wrongs. This does not damn the Curst further: the moral value of sparing another man from sin counts for more.

  In truth, this means they can become little more than unpaid mercenaries, for the greater the wrong they take on, the greater the redemption. They will, it is reckoned, do almost anything for anyone.

  Renner Lightburn had done much for me. He came upon me when I was in plight, and did his best to protect me. His own crime, when he finally confessed it to me, was the ill-judged act of defending a latent psyker, a young girl, from the temple hierarchs. In me, a latent anti-psyker, he saw some agreeable symmetry, as if my salvation would out-balance his original sin.

  I later learned he had been set upon this duty by Mam Mordaunt, the headmistress of the Maze Undue, who I now believe to be an agent of the Cognitae. Renner had no idea – nor would he have truly cared – that he was working on behalf of darker forces, though in truth it was later revealed that the Mam Mordaunt who had engaged him was not the Mam Mordaunt, but in fact an agent of the inquisitor Ravenor, posing as her. Having delivered me to Ravenor, Lightburn’s memories had been expunged, and he was returned to the city streets.

  No matter his original crime (which, I must say, I had much sympathy for), he did not deserve this. Curst or not, he had been staunch and valiant. I had been concerned for his welfare since. And I wanted to thank him for his duty personally, for we had been parted abruptly.

  With this course in mind, I crossed the wide boulevard of Ropeburn in the sheeting rain, and approached the undercroft of Saint Nodens’.

  The temple is old, dark and very plain, like a towered bunker of the Munitorum, and on this day, the bulk of it could scarcely be picked out against the blackness of the heavens. There was a wide, paved court before it where beggars normally gathered, but this area was empty, aside from a few discarded blanket rags, and the sousing rain plashed everywhere with such force it threw spray back up into the air. I spied a figure in the entrance arch, fighting in the wind to secure the donation boxes before they could be carried off to tumble down the street. It was a deacon of the temple, who told me beggars and Curst had been seen in the yard, but several days of storm had driven them off, in search of shelter. He suggested I tried the arches beneath the viaduct, or perhaps the almshouse that occupied part of the precinct’s undercroft. I could tell he was baffled as to the reason for my enquiry.

  The almshouse lay down some stone steps to the side of the court. It was little more than a soup kitchen, and stank of boiled cabbage. An almoner and his novice helper were making some thin breakfast in the dank interior, and the place was crowded with destitute souls, who had come there as much to be out of the gale and rain as to get a bowl of food.

  I was by then wet to the bone, and so dishevelled I passed for a street wretch myself. I asked the almoner if he had seen any of the Curst that day, and he replied he had seen some, but did not recognise Lightburn from my description. To him, I think, all Curst and vagabonds were alike, and passed him by in the soup line without him remarking on any of them.

  Lightburn was not there. I wondered if Cherubael had lied to me, or if he had been pranking me, sending me out into the storm on a fool’s errand. But he had never shown me any malice – an odd thing to say, I know, when speaking of a daemon – so it seemed strange that he would make wilful mischief for me.

  I spoke instead to some of the paupers and ruffians. Several had seen Curst that morning, and two thought they knew Lightburn from my talk of him. The outcast of Queen Mab do not see each other as anonymous and uniform, though I feel this had more to do with their constant wariness of strangers, potential dangers, and outsiders encroaching on their patches.

  ‘A man come in,’ said one. ‘He was a Curst himself, and he took them away. Early this day, it was.’

  ‘Took them away?’ I asked.

  ‘He come in every few days, offers coin or food to those who will help him in his burden. Some take him up, some don’t.’

  ‘How do they help him?’ I asked.

  ‘I think,’ said another, ‘that they fight for him. For them as come back are often cut or bloody. That’s why I never gone.’

  I knew that fight rings existed in the city, illegal bouts for wager and sport. It did not surprise me that those used for this underground vice were recruited – for a few paltry coins or a crust of bread – from the beggars and the Curst. The city has a dark core, and it is distressing to encounter proof of its meagre-hearted cruelty.

  ‘Where do they go?’ I asked.

  ‘Down the bonehall, so it’s said.’

  The bonehall was the Ossuary of St Belpheg, a catacomb where the bones of the dead from the Orphaeonic War were stacked like kindling. It lay across the temple pavement beneath the bell tower and the Old Burn Wall, and by the time I reached it, even though I ran, I was soaked through, yet again. The storm seemed quite committed to drowning the city in water and gloom.

  There was a small gate, which I passed through, and beyond, a narrow hall, quite plunged in darkness, which stank of damp. Through sad archways to either side, I could discern the first of the chambers in which the bones were racked, the old bones of the war dead, brave souls and cowards mingled without distinction. Thus are we all levelled in the end, so the parable says, where a life’s virtue weighs no more or less than a life’s unvirtue.

  Beyond the stone hall, steps led down into the earth, and I groped my way. Here, mould and lichen both inhabited the walls, and where the stonework was bare, it had been polished like glass by the calcified downrun of water from the surface. This was a frontier, where the living city above ceased and became a dead and buried foundation made of crushed yesterdays. I was entering the rubble and spoil of the city’s roots, the stratum of compacted ruin on which the present city stood. It was the past down here, the compressed layers of previous Queen Mabs that had been folded under, reduced to the rubble on which the city built and rebuilt itself, like a weary swimmer struggling to stay afloat. Down here were the broken things, the things that no one needed or wanted or remembered any more. I fancied that down here might be found all the things that had ever been lost, and all the things that had ever been forgotten. Down here was where they slipped and fell, and lay hidden from the day.

  I hoped Lightburn might be one of them.

  Each flight of the steps showed me shadowed galleries of the bonehall, where bundles of long bones were heaped on stone shelves, and skulls, tobacco-brown, sat watching on ledges. The darkness was enveloping, and water ran from the ceiling in many places, for the rain finds its way down into the darkness just as surely as things forgotten. I wondered how much longer it would have to rain before these stone cavities began to fill.

  I came to another crypt tunnel, which I followed. There was no one around, but the iron covers of the lanterns along the wall were still warm to the touch, as if they had been not long put out. There was a smell of tallow, of gutter-smoke, and also the cold scent of ’roma, that heady blend of lho that was now so popular a vice.

  Presently, I heard voices. I tucked myself against the deepest shadows of the wall, and peered into the blue gloom. I had apprehension, certainly. I also had a quad-snub fastened in a holster under my coat, and spare shells in my belt. Harlon Nayl, whose life had taught him such things, had insisted that none of us go abroad beyond the walls of Bifrost unarmed.

  In a chamber not far on, there were some seven or eight persons, chatting to each other as they closed their business for
the day. One, an elder officer of the watch by his uniform coat, was hooking a glow-globe to a pole, so as to light his comrades’ way back to the surface now the lanterns were out. By the globe’s sallow glare, I saw the others: a vagabond woman in an apron, gathering together a box of herb-salves and bandages, and brown-ply aid kits that had surely been stolen from some medicae office; another woman, older and folded in a threadbare shawl, who was tossing items into a battered metal pail; two men of the roughest disposition, who were collecting up old billhooks, short-blades, cudgels and such, and returning them to a large dresser-cupboard that had clearly once stood grandly in some monastic prefectory for the storage of surplices, candles and altar-cloths. A third man, little more than a youth, was wiping chalkboards fixed to the wall, to clear what was writ upon them, while a fourth, an elderly fellow, had placed himself on a nursing stool, and was assisting his comrades by means of strenuous advice and instruction. This old fellow was a veteran, and still wore his patched Militarum greatcoat. His voice was thick with the phlegmy cough and rattle of a ’romatik, and he was filling a clay pipe with more of the pungent weed.

  A final soul, a tall and surly burdener by his sleeves of tattooed sins, was occupied with the chaining up of a gate of iron bars.

  ‘Am I too late for the sport?’ I asked in street Mabiçoise, stepping into the lamplight.

  They all looked at me in surprise, and some measure of unfriendliness.

  ‘You sho’n’t be here, missy,’ said the older woman.

  ‘This is no place for you,’ agreed the old soldier, turning on his stool to fix me with a mean stare. ‘Be on.’ His eyes were glazed drowsy from the ’roma he had partaken of.

  I saw the tall burdener stiffen, and reach his hand behind his hip, surely to rest upon some weapon. He was the one I would need to watch.

  ‘But I wish to have a wager,’ I said, all innocence. ‘Is this not where the sport is done?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s done already,’ said the youth, still clutching the chalkboard’s dirty sponge in his fingers. ‘They’ve gone in, half-hour ago already. There’s no more sport today.’