Context (23 page)

Off to one side, two medics were
working on the injured courier. He lay on a blue emergency pallet, eyes closed
as they fitted an amber cast to his shattered arm.

‘Friggin’ stokhastikos!’

One of the men tripped, caught
off balance by a froggly underfoot. He fell heavily onto the flagstones, and
the two frogglies he had been holding bounced free.

‘This is your fault,’ the foreman
said, trying to hold in his laughter. His big shoulders shook.

‘Sorry.’ Tom could not help
grinning.

Two more men entered the dock,
and Tom recognized them both.

What are you doing here?

It made reasonable sense that
Xyenquil should be involved in a medical case, come to see the injured courier.
But he was accompanied by a blond man wearing a violet tunic and burgundy
cloak, with an amber ovoid inset on his left cheek: Ralkin Velsivith. News
travelled fast.

A froggly bounded across Tom’s
path as he made his way towards them.

‘My Lord.’ Velsivith gave an
abbreviated bow. ‘Exactly what happened to him?’

‘I’m not
exactly
sure,’
said Tom.

The words roused the courier, who
looked up from the pallet. Half a dozen frogglies were sitting on his chest.
But he stared at Velsivith, taking in the twin daggers at his hips, the
unmistakable security officer demeanour—

‘No!’ Xyenquil dropped to the man’s
side, fumbling for a medi-strip.

The courier’s eyes rolled up in
their sockets —

Sweet Fate.

— and his body gave one great
spasmodic twitch, then lay still.

‘Destiny!’

Thanatotrope.

‘Another suicide.’

Velsivith stared at Tom.

‘I don’t—’

But Xyenquil was running a scan
over the courier’s corpse, and when he looked up it was almost with relief.

‘An ordinary thanatotrope, if
that makes sense.’ He shrugged. ‘Just a suicide implant. No additional
features, I’d say, unlike Captain Strelsthorm’s ... Well. But whoever he was’—nodding
towards Velsivith—‘he chose death rather than your custody, Lieutenant.’

Velsivith turned away then, but
for one extraordinary moment Tom could have sworn that it was tears that caused
the lieutenant’s eyes to glisten: a strange liquid regret which was totally
incongruous on a hardened intelligence officer.

Particularly one who worked for
an organization which had the safety of the wealthy Aurineate Grand’aume as its
prime remit, and the implicit authority, Tom was sure, to carry out its work in
any fashion necessary.

~ * ~

14

NULAPEIRON
AD 3418

Creamy
jade, carved opalescent panels which cast their own diffuse light—for an
interrogation chamber, it showed a great deal of style.

‘If I’d wanted to kill him’—Tom
sat down on a low jade bench, facing Velsivith—‘I wouldn’t have carried him to
safety. I could’ve drowned.’

‘So you were friends.’ With a
fingernail Velsivith tapped the ovoid in his cheek. ‘Or merely colleagues?’

‘I’d never seen him before.’

‘So you said.’

Tom tried to keep calm. This was
standard technique, nothing more. Nothing personal.

But Velsivith’s attitude had
changed, covering any evidence of regret and replacing it with impersonal
efficiency, as though he were under scrutiny as much as Tom.

‘I’ve nothing to hide.’ Tom
shrugged.

Velsivith reached inside his
cloak, pulled out something.

A bluemetal poignard, sheathed.

Searched my quarters.
Bad sign.

‘Somebody gave it to me.’ Tom
shook his head, exasperated. ‘A vassal. With no message.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing.’

Did the Kilware Associates
hallmark mean anything to Velsivith? Tom suspected the shadowy weapons
suppliers of a great deal, but this was the first sign of them he had come
across in years. And there were more pressing concerns, which made Tom question
the wisdom of meekly following Velsivith to this place.

‘You have to leave this realm,’
the courier had said.

Perhaps he should have taken more
notice, treated it with urgency.

Sentinel. You tried to warn me.

Risking a courier. But why commit
suicide?

There’s more going on than I know
about. Far more.

‘I’m sorry.’ Velsivith looked
down at the floor. ‘I’d like to believe you, Lord Corcorigan. I really would.’

‘So why don’t you—’

But then a platoon of soldiers
burst in.

Move. Now.

The most propitious time for
escape from capture is the first few seconds. Tom launched himself, leaping
from the bench, crescent kick deflecting the first soldier’s graser rifle,
straight-arming him into another’s field of fire, a clear path to the doorway
but—

Flash of white.

A stunburst exploded and he fell.

Darkness.

Came
to, retching.

Cold, naked, fastened somehow in
a standing position.

Destiny
—

He coughed, spat. But the phlegm
landed on a floor which was liquid red and glistening, like flayed flesh, and
his spittle was absorbed quickly, greedily.

Where am I?

Pink/red gelatinous tendrils
encircled his upper arm, his ankles and his throat. Merging with the floor, the
walls. The entire chamber was of warm, wet flesh-like stuff. As he watched, it
pulsed once then lay quiescent, gently quivering. It was like the interior of a
great stomach, and he the food morsel about to be dissolved in acid and
digested: tiny and of no significance beyond his constituent minerals and macro-molecules.

Tom’s stallion talisman no longer
hung round his neck.

Father
. . .

Carved by his father, enhanced by
the Pilot... he never, ever removed it. Anxiety made him suck in a breath:
instant cold pain flared in his mouth, rousing him.

Evaluate.

They had broken several of his
teeth. His right eye was swollen shut, thick with fluid pain, and his left
thigh throbbed. When he swallowed, a tight dry band of agony tightened his
throat: someone had struck him across the larynx with fatal intent, and he knew
that he was lucky to be alive.

Some luck. Should‘ve known...

His diaphragm was cramped with
tension, and his ribs -broken, for sure—lanced sharply with every breath.

‘Well, well.’

A stocky figure clothed in grey,
with hood and heavy gauntlets, came through the red flesh-wall—it
slurped,
liquid
and obscene, as he slipped inside—and he stopped, pulling off the hood. The man
was grizzled and scarred, and grinning broadly.

‘Neural interrogation,’ he said. ‘Heard
of it? Does no real damage, just hurts like heisenberg.’

Tom stared at him.

‘Thing is’—the man spat—‘clever
folks know that. Override the pain, like. So we doesn’t waste our precious
bleedin’ time with it.’

‘What... do you want to know?’

A shrug of heavy shoulders. ‘Not
a soddin’ thing, me darling boy.’

Then his gauntlet-clad big hand
slowly encircled Tom’s soft defenceless testicles, rough against flaccid skin,
and tightly squeezed. Molten pain exploded, pulsed in sickening waves, even
when the iron grip relinquished its agonizing and degrading hold.

Smiling, the grizzled man swiped
his hand, stiff-fingered, across Tom’s stomach. For a moment nothing happened,
then Tom’s abdominal skin split apart, red and glistening, revealing greyish
balls of fat bathed in warm blood, with layered fibrous muscle.

‘Looks like you got guts, boy.’
His face was mere centimetres from Tom’s, and his breath stank of something
foul and rotted, even through the waves of agony rolling over Tom. ‘Who’d’a
thought?’

And then, with a grey-toothed
smile which knew nothing of decency or compassion, alive with its own twisted
fires and desire, he bent down over Tom and got to work.