An hour into the symposium it became clear we weren’t all going to get out alive.
I’d come to watch. To spectate. Covering my identity with the paperwork of an archaeolinguist from Shurfath, the local universitariate, and disguising my face and build with scholar’s robes and a falsehood, I’d come to sit among the academics and the savants in the gallery.
I lie. I hadn’t come to watch. I’d come to see him. It had been a long time since I’d last seen him. Fifty years? A century? I lose count.
Bader Vecum had died. That was the start of it. Bader Vecum, eleventh son of an eleventh son, the last discernible branch of a noble house line that had ruled the island nation of Maelificer for thirty generations, had died. You know the island, I’m sure. In the cold, green northern oceans of Gudrun, in the Helican sub; a place of mild summers and dark winters, of ice-capped peaks and geothermal power, of ancient towns etched into the steep sides of dead volcanoes. To the north of the island, the jagged black walls of the continental shelf can be seen on a clear day, three hundred kilometres away across a forbidding polar sea.
House Vecum had a seat in Gudrun’s Upper Legislature, but it had never been one of the most powerful or influential of Gudrun’s noble families. Over the centuries, Maelificer had been sustained by the export of preserved fish, seabed ores, and by geothermic power, but it had always maintained a reputation as a seat of learning. In those steep, cliff-side towns, there flourished Shurfath Universitariate, two academies of rubrication, six museums, and four distinguished library collections, all thanks to the scholarly enthusiasms of the noble Vecums, amateur philologists all.
Now the last was dead, without issue, of terribly old age, and Maelificer was to be administered by the Vecum’s mainland cousins in House Courel. Bader Vecum’s famous private library was to be broken up and dispersed into the discipline libraries of Shurfath, as well as several mainland scholams.
There had always been talk that House Vecum’s private library contained some items of unusually esoteric merit and, as is often the case with old collections long held in private hands, the Inquisition had appointed an emissary to oversee the disbursement of its contents. One can never be too careful. Even without any malicious intent on the part of its owners, a thousand-year-old collection might have something pernicious festering at the back of a shelf. I have personally seen great tragedies unfold because of the unwitting ownership of the blasphemous.
I have seen a page of faded manuscript kill a world.
We gathered in the empty house, high on the steepest scarps of the island’s peaks. It was the end of autumn, and the first ice was glinting in the harbour, the first dark, deep-ocean gales were building out in the west. Migratory birds mobbed the skies outside the high windows, preparing for departure. Servants hurried from draughty room to draughty room, nursing warmth out of the corroding heating systems that Bader Vecum had allowed to ail alongside his health.
Inquisitor Cyriaque led the symposium. With his interrogator, Voriet, and three savants, he had spent two months sifting the collection. He was now presenting his conclusions to a body of his peers from the ordos, along with an invited audience of academics, for deliberation. Eighteen volumes had already been sequestered without consultation. The Inquisition does not invite opinion on some matters. But there remained one hundred and fifty-one items where a strong argument could be made for careful academic study rather than strict prohibition. Chancellor Manivar of Shurfath was particularly insistent on this possibility.
‘Shurfath’s reputation,’ he said, rising to his feet at the start of the symposium, ‘which I may be so bold as to suggest extends beyond Gudrun and the subsector to the local Imperium Sector range, depends so much upon the quality of our collection. And that collection, at its core, has been the great work of House Vecum, whose broad and admirable curiosity has allowed them to accumulate a vast and irreplaceable archive of books down the ages. While we understand the necessity of restricting some volumes, from time to time, for the social good, we urge the worthy ordos not to sequester the entire catalogue. It is not all contaminated because of one or two unwise inclusions. Please allow as much of the whole as possible to be transferred to the academic files of Shurfath and its fellow institutions at home and abroad.’
I was broadly in agreement with the chancellor’s wishes. I had reviewed the questionable pieces, and there was nothing in them that warranted censorship. Depriving scholars of access to such material blunts our collective knowledge.
But, you may remark, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
I also liked Shurfath. There was something about the cold, hard climate of Maelificer that focused scholarly intent. Some of the most learned members of the sector’s ordos had studied there at one time or another: I myself had spent nine months there, trawling its stacks. That was many, many years previously, when I was attempting to do some background research on a matter that had occupied a colleague of mine during a visit to Elvara Cardinal. Though answers had eluded me (and the man was long since dead), I had come to appreciate Shurfath’s atmosphere and learning.
Inquisitor Cyriaque leant towards the chancellor’s way of thinking too, but he was young, and this was one of his first formal duties. He knew that the eyes of seniors were upon him. He could not afford to seem lenient. He could not afford to appear radical.
There’s a potent word: Radical.
The first volume was brought out for examination and discussion, the first of the one hundred and fifty-one in question. It was going to be a long process. Cyriaque had chosen a small lecture room in the upper levels of the vertical palace, a gloomy, wood-panelled chamber of uninterrupted brown. It had once been used by medicae students for anatomy lessons, and there were tiers of seats around the central stage. The tiered gallery stalls, like a little box theatre, were almost as sheer as the cliffs outside. We leant on the wooden handrails and peered down into the gas-lit arena where Cyriaque’s savants, their hands white-gloved, were laying the first questionable book on a piezo-charged neutralising cloth. Voriet, the interrogator, had placed aversive wards around the lip of the wooden stage. There were guards too: Inquisitorial servants in the stern robes of the ordos, and the more ostentatious men-at-arms of House Vecum.
Cyriaque began his review. The book was a copy of a copy of Unacius’ Readings, one from which the notorious ‘poetry’ had long since been expunged. It was undoubtedly harmless, an unloaded gun. The mezzopict illustrations were, however, charming and rare, and deserved to be held for the benefit of students of the visual arts. The chancellor rose and, once Cyriaque had finished his summary, said as much.
The ordos seniors seemed unmoved. Old Karnot Vesher would be, I knew well, monodominant to the end, hardline, bitter. Adrianne Corwal was harder to read. An elegant, diligent woman, she had her psyber drone hover over the pages as the savants turned them, relaying close-ups to her optic implants. Zaul Gaguach seemed bored. I distinctly heard him twice ask an aide what the palace kitchens were preparing for supper.
And then there was him, of course. Faceless, implacable, as unreadable as a blunt. It is not weakness to confess that I felt a certain emotional response when he moved from the shadows, onto the stage. It had been a very long time, and we had once been very close.
His career had been blighted by the affair of Slyte. His career, and the Kell Mountain region of Sarre Province. Gudrun, and Eustis Majoris too, bore the scars of his work.
I knew full well those modest scars were far preferable to the fatal exit wounds that would have been the consequence of his inaction, but Lord Grandmaster Rorken had been obliged to censure him. In the service of the Throne, and the Holy Ordos, he had been required to operate on a rogue status. He had saved, at a conservative estimate, trillions of lives. Even so, the aftermath had been a terrible mess. In order to continue in service with the Ordos Helican, he had agreed to suspend his active status and fulfil an advisory role in the Inquisition’s headquarters.
A waste. A waste of a huge talent. At least, I had heard, he was writing again.
The Readings were finally passed for collation. His vote swung it, though his aye was the only word he uttered. I was glad to see that a fear of accusations of radicalism, a fear that he was the rogue they had always suspected, did not stay his hand. He knew what was right and what was foolishly wrong, and the mezzopicts belonged in a decent library.
The second work was brought out and introduced by Cyriaque. It was a ‘tarnished’ copy of an M.39 Ennead, where old, block-printing transposition errors had created quasi-blasphemous images of the Emperor.
I had honestly thought we would get all the way to item sixteen – a prayer pamphlet of the Technotic Sect that had a genuinely heretical tone – before there would be any real dissent or argument. That would probably take up the whole of the first day. In one of the scheduled breaks, or perhaps after the evening session, I would steal my chance to talk to him.
But it didn’t go anything like that.
As Cyriaque’s savants turned the pages of the Ennead with their white-gloved hands, one of the House Vecum guardsmen at the back of the room, a tall fellow with a lugubrious expression, shifted uneasily. He was wearing a long green coat, a white sash, and copious gold braid, and his tall silver helm was festooned with the feathers of the oceanic greywing. He was holding a ceremonial poleaxe.
I noticed him twitch for a second time, and thought perhaps he was suffering from indigestion or other gastric discomfort. Then he hoisted the poleaxe and, with a slightly bemused frown, plunged it into the nearest ordos guard.
There was a prodigious quantity of blood. A major artery had been severed, and the force of blood pressure all but hosed the backs of the seniors on the stage.
The mess did not concern me much, nor the sudden commotion, the shouting, the movement, or the production of weapons. The poor house guardsman, already surprised at becoming a killer, was positively astonished to be killed. An outraged Inquisitorial agent drew down and shot him at point-blank range, and he fell backwards, releasing his grip on the haft of the poleaxe, which was still twitching in time with the ebbing arterial pulse.
My concern was the sense I had registered the moment before the killer struck. A tiny pulse of psychic power.
The house guardsman had been a puppet. A mind had used him. It had taken control of his limbs, and forced his action before he’d even had a chance to resist.
That was power. Worse, it was precision.
There is only one thing more dangerous than a human psyker. It is a human psyker expertly trained by the scholastica psykana.
I know. I am one.
The murderer’s executioner, standing over the body with his sidearm drawn, suddenly became the next instrument of the invisible agency. He shivered. Then he turned and started to shoot, wildly, into the galleries and across the stage. One of the savants was cut down, and Cyriaque was hit in the thigh. Guards – both ordos and house – who had rushed forward to help the first butchered victim and restrain his killer scattered.
Karnot Vesher was a psychic. Hurling himself out of his seat, the back of his coat soaked in blood, he yelled a command word at the shooter, who was one of his own retinue. The chilling use of will made me flinch. Vesher was strong, but his practice was clumsy. There was none of the stiletto finesse that had triggered the incident.
The guard with the gun ceased his rampage, impelled by Vesher’s will. He halted, and looked down at the gun he was holding as if its presence in his hand was an utter mystery.
Confusion had dulled everyone’s wits. The guard with the pistol, stunned to inaction by Vesher’s yell, was no longer the problem. The rogue mind had flitted on, leaving one slave for another.
Another House Vecum guard, a captain, had dropped down beside the first victim, attempting in great earnest to ease the fellow’s miserable death. The captain suddenly shivered, and wrenched the offending poleaxe out of the first victim’s torso. He rose, a brimming lake of blood around him on the floor, and ran the brute weapon at Vesher as one might run down a boar.
The captain would have killed the inquisitor cleanly, but for two factors. Vesher used his will again, and screamed a frantic command of prohibition. The captain was too possessed by a superior mind for it to be fully effective, but it did make him hesitate, and his boots, decorated with velvet rosettes and brocade, slipped in the pooling blood.
Instead of impaling Karnot Vesher’s chest, the spike of the poleaxe cracked through the inquisitor’s left hip and pinned him to the wooden frame of the box gallery.
His outraged scream was as considerable as the quantity of blood that he began to leak. Around them, guards of both stripe opened fire, and cut the blameless captain down from several directions.
They were all idiots. The mind had already moved.
The galleries were emptying. Spectators, in great agitation, were fleeing to the comparative safety of the side rooms and the waiting chambers.
I knew it was time to withdraw. The bloodshed on the little galleried stage, which had taken on the ridiculous quality of some gruesome pantomime show, had been just that, a show. The majority of the most powerful and capable people at the symposium were on that stage, and the attack had been designed to occupy them, to confuse them, to create a debacle that would entirely focus the attention of the audience.
Their demise had not been the primary intention, however. If one of the ordos seniors had been the target, why begin with the guard?
I was sure I was the true target.
Somehow, some agency had learned of my presence. I seldom frequented public or populated areas, but someone had found out about this one, rare appearance.
Where had I slipped up? How had I shown myself? For many years, I had lived other lives, covering all trace of myself. Where had I made a mistake? What fragment of truth had I left uncovered?
Was it simply my determination to meet with him here? Had that been my undoing?
Who was to blame? Who had come for me?
I have, I am sorry to reflect, accumulated far too many mortal enemies.
And I share the same Archenemy as the rest of my species.
I left the gallery, and took the small back stairs, a dark flight of wooden steps with a tight turn. I pushed my way past straggling spectators who were making for the exit. Some cried out as I pushed them aside, afraid that death was coming to touch them too.
I was armed with a power knife in a sprung sheath along my left forearm, and a Tronsvasse auto in a flat holster under my coat, but my most dangerous weapon was inside my skull.
I reached a lower hallway under the lecture room. The floors were boarded with gleaming black timber, and dressed with old rugs. The walls were lacquered panels. Dim, ancient faces peered out of ancient oil paint scenes in ancient frames. Refugees from the audience had accumulated in the hallway, huddled savants and frightened scholars. When they saw me, and read my grim sense of purpose, they shrank from me and fled.
My disguise – especially the uncanny ancient technology of the falsehood – was good enough to cover me under regular circumstances. Sitting, walking, standing, I was just another figure of no consequence. But now I was moving with speed, and no amount of borrowed finery and optic deception could cover my bulk and my oh-so-mechanical gait in rapid motion. I was clearly no academic. I was still a tall, broad-shouldered man, and what damage life has done to my solid frame, augmetics have repaired. Servo-assist leg-frames become obvious when one is running, and no one could mistake the martial training evident in my bearing.
Vesher’s brittle screams were still echoing from the lecture room above me. I believe that, by then, they were attempting to unpin his smashed pelvis from the panelling.
I felt the rogue mind flick across me, hunting for me, fixing on my psychic aura. I wrenched the auto from my concealed rig.
Just in time.
Shots came at me down the hallway, hard rounds. They drove into the wood panels like gas-gunned rivets, flecking the air with splinters. The scholars around me broke again, this time caught between my threatening form and the source of the gunfire.
More shots. Two of the scholars were hit as they milled in front of me, and crashed to the floor.
I brought the Tronsvasse up, still moving.
One shooter was half-concealed behind a golden helm and carapace displayed on a pedestal. I fired, missed, but made the attacker duck back into cover.
There was a second, concealed on the other side of the hallway. He was firing a large-calibre pistol. I saw the muzzle flash of the weapon as a bullet hissed past me, and aimed for that.
I think I hit him in the hand or forearm. I heard a yelp.
I used my will, and declared, ‘Show yourselves!’
Though they were both being slaved by the rogue mind, my raw command was enough to make them falter and stumble out of cover for a moment.
Both were ordos guards, black-suited members of Gaguach’s retinue. They were blameless and, like as not, would be free of control again in a moment. But I had not the luxury to show any mercy. Still running, I fired. Two shots, to the left, to the right. Each round struck the middle of a forehead and knocked a man on his back.
I had reached the end of the hallway. The door to a retiring room lay open to my right, and stairs were directly ahead. The scholars had all fled. I could still hear their cries of fright and panic from the staircase. I could still hear Vesher howling at a pain that would blight the rest of his life.
‘Who are you?’ I asked, reloading. ‘Who are you? Where are you?’
+Who are you?+ a mind-voice answered. Cold, crisp. The sort of sharp voice a blade would use if it could speak.
I turned slowly, watching the doors and exits.
‘Who are you?’ I repeated, adding will to the words.
+Who are you? I did not expect you. You were not anticipated. Who are you? Reveal your name.+
The will-force in the send almost made me speak my name aloud, but I bit back. So I wasn’t the intended target after all. I was, in fact, the rogue element. The unexpected player in the game.
+I know you. I can smell your mind. The rogue. The famous pariah. Long years since your rosette carried any authority.+
The mind was strong. I pushed at it, harder, harder still. I knew the psyker was stronger than me, but sometimes strength isn’t everything. I was hoping to outflank it with skill and practiced technique, to wrong-foot it. The mind sounded young, not experienced enough to know every trick an old dog has in his book.
But it was hard to push, because the mind kept moving. There was a flexibility to the psionic pattern that was quite disturbing. It was fluid. It flitted, like a wild bird, from slave to slave, yet it did so with great purpose and accuracy. It was not simply ricocheting from one consciousness to the next.
It was fast. Strong and fast.
I pushed again. It slipped aside, but this time I came away holding some words torn off its elusive subconscious like a handful of grass.
Grael Ochre, the Yellow King.
‘Grael Ochre. Is that your name?’
No answer.
‘Yellow King… of what?’
No answer.
‘Yellow for cowardice? Won’t you reply?’
I pushed again.
‘What is Orpheus, Grael Ochre?’ I asked. ‘Why does that word lurk so brightly in your mind?’
The mind pushed back. Fire cored through the neural links of my augmetics, making me gasp and stagger to the wall for support. All my old wounds – all the artificial neurons spliced in to allow me to control my exo- and endo-augmetics – shrieked with induced pain, the cellular memory of injury and surgical incisions replayed.
Clever, turning old pain against me. Getting me out of his head.
He was gone again. The house was alive with the sounds of shouting, of security teams rushing up and down the tight, wooden staircases. I limped into the retiring room, and pulled the door shut behind me. It was cold in there, unfriendly. No one had bothered heating it for the day. A limpid grey light fell through the tall windows. Drapes and tapestries hung dark like shrouds. There were shelves of books, some ragged furniture.
I needed to sit down. I tried to let go of the pain he’d poured into me. This Grael Ochre, whoever he was – and I was sure a name like that was just another mask, a psydonym – was cruel and exceptionally skilled. I had only stolen the few clues I had by brazen persistence and the fact that he had not expected another psyker to be in play at the symposium.
He had lit me up with old agonies: ghosts of all the wounds and traumas I had ever suffered, and not just the physical ones. I was almost overcome with a sense of loss, of several losses. Remembered grief. I saw faces, briefly, in my mind’s eye. Faces I had not thought of in years. Uber Aemos, my long dead savant. The irrepressible Midas Betancore. Fischig, stubborn to the end. Tobias Maxilla and his gleaming artificial life. Alizebeth Bequin.
He woke them up. Grael Ochre woke them all up, and sent them to torment me for a minute or two until the pain ebbed away.
‘Why are you here?’
I looked around sharply. He was right behind me. Perhaps he had taken shelter in the retiring room too, or perhaps he had been drawn to the flash of my mind. He was a dark shape, a shadow beside the seaward windows. It was as though he didn’t want to be involved in anything.
‘You recognise me?’ I asked.
‘Of course. Even with the falsehood, I had a suspicion. Is this anything to do with you? Today’s little round of murder and puppet-play?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought someone might have been taking advantage of me making a public appearance, but that was arrogant. It’s not me they’re after. Does the name Grael Ochre mean anything?’
‘No.’
‘The Yellow King?’
‘No.’
‘I see,’ I said. Was he ignorant, or was he just not playing? Throne knew, he had no reason to trust me. He hadn’t had for years.
I removed the falsehood so he could see my face. My scarred, expressionless face.
‘It is good to see you,’ I said.
His vox-speakers made a noise, perhaps the approximation of a sardonic laugh. I was not seeing him, and he was not seeing me. There was no expression, or even micro-expression, to read on my frozen face, and no nuance to prove that I genuinely was pleased.
And he was just the chair: the armoured, hard-machined, floating shape that stored and supported his helpless organic remains. He was seeing me through optical relays, and speaking via voxponder circuits. The armoured prow of his chair unit was no more readable than my features.
It looked as if he had not maintained the exterior of his chair in a long while. It was scarred and scratched, and the paint was flaking. He had not bothered to keep up its sinister appearance for field work.
Spots of fresh blood dappled one side of the chair’s armour.
‘Why are you here?’ he asked.
‘I came to see you.’
‘We have not seen each other for a very long time, Gregor. I had not expected ever to see you again.’
‘Times change,’ I replied.
‘So do people. Neither of us is what we used to be. Rogues, the pair of us.’
‘You were only rogue by circumstance,’ I said.
‘It cost me my career. And that implies you are not a rogue by circumstance. Are you really the radical they say you are? The diabolus threat that has five sectors looking for you?’
‘What I am is immaterial–’
‘Not so,’ he replied. ‘Even if you are innocent, this isn’t the time or place to prove it. Your reputation is accursed. You should not be here.’
‘I walk where I choose.’
‘Dark places, all of them.’
‘And I am not here to prove my innocence. I am here to see you.’
‘Which is why you should not be here at all,’ he said.
Gunfire echoed down through the house. Upstairs, another attempt was being made to smoke out or kill the psyker assassin.
‘You could stop that. You could crush him,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘You’re the strongest mind on the island.’
‘Once, perhaps.’
‘You won’t use your psy to restore order here?’
‘Others will. Gaguach and Corwal are closing the killer down. Another few minutes.’
‘Neither of them is strong enough.’
‘Together, they’ll do it.’
‘So you don’t use your mind anymore?’ I asked.
‘It was a condition of my pardon. The inquiry lasted fifteen years, Gregor. Molotch made a terrible mess.’
‘Not as terrible as the one he wanted to make. The one you stopped.’
‘I agreed to retire from active duty. I swore to suspend my mind from psychic activity. I merely use the little mind-impulse I need to control the chair and run life support. Nothing else. Nothing active. Not even telepathy.’
‘Why? The greatest mind of your generation.’
‘In a ruined body, with a shattered reputation. My mind and your body, there’s almost one whole person between us. Almost.’
I looked away. Even without the nuance of micro-expression on my part, he could tell he’d offended me.
‘Your skin is thinner these days,’ he said. ‘It was a joke, yet it cut you. You never used to care. Are you so ashamed of the path you’ve taken?’
I holstered my weapon and readjusted my falsehood.
‘I came to see you,’ I said. ‘I know it’s been a long time, but it was for something important. But I can see you’ve changed. There is no point bringing this to you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll get over my disappointment.’
‘We cannot work together,’ he said. ‘We cannot be seen together, or have any association.’
‘Because I am a radical? Diabolus?’
‘Because I was given a choice after Molotch,’ he replied. ‘Retire from active service and refrain from psionics. Or, on behalf of the Holy Ordos, hunt down my old master, the heretic Gregor Eisenhorn.’
I did not know what to say. He had chosen the prison of his chair and the negation of his extraordinary consciousness over me.
‘This thing,’ he said, ‘this psyker that has come hunting in House Vecum today. I think it’s come for me. I made enemies. Molotch, Culzean, and their ilk, they had associates. They belonged to secret orders and clandestine frateries. Their kin want me dead. While I abstain from psionics, there is no satisfaction in killing me. They are goading me. It’s happened before. They are daring me to use my psy again. When I do, I will become a worthy target again. Then they will exact vengeance and kill me. I refuse to play their games and rise to it. This matter here, this Grael Ochre… it will be done soon. Calm will be restored. Go now, Gregor. Go now, before they lock the place down. You cannot be found here, for your own sake and for mine.’
I nodded. I turned.
‘Does the word Orpheus mean anything to you?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No,’ I said.
Another vox noise, the analogue of a sigh.
‘Then good-bye, Gregor,’ he said.
‘It really was good to see you, Gideon,’ I replied.
With a soft whir of suspensor mech, the chair turned to face the seaward windows. Ravenor was no longer looking at me.
‘I hope we never meet again,’ he said. His voxponder was toneless.
Covered by the falsehood, its resolution turned to maximum effect, I left the palace by the back staircase, and exited into the deep, hillside well of covered steps below the ramparts. An hour’s walk, down the steep black stairs that snaked down the windswept cliff, would bring me to the harbour road. From there, I could reach the boat-dock in the shadow of Shurfath Universitariate where my launch was hidden, and quit Maelificer.
Behind me, the sporadic sounds of gunfire continued to disturb the mountain air, and I could still feel a dangerous mind at large.
I hate running from a fight.
As it turns out, I wasn’t.