Salvation Page 4

  ‘Why do you let them in here? They’re… unclean,’ said Triar, tilting his head slightly to one side to indicate his curiosity.

  ‘Their money’s as good as yours,’ replied the short man on the counter, lifting the steaming bottle neck away from Triar’s cup.

  ‘No it isn’t. It’s unclean. It may look the same, but it will rot your soul while you sleep.’

  ‘That’s my problem then, not yours,’ countered Squatz, trying to placate the Cawdor without being forced to convert. He had never understood the appeal of the Cult of Redemption, nor the strange devotion of many of the Cawdor gangers. In fact, Triar was such a devotee that he had named his own gang The Salvationists, and he made it his business to prosecute the cause of righteousness as though he were himself the leader of a Redemptionist crusade. Not all of his gangers shared his passion for the cult, but they were all in awe of their boss’s sense of duty.

  Triar gazed at Squatz for a moment, holding his cloudy green eyes for a number of seconds, his face-mask seeming to glow with compassion. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. Souls are my concern, Squatz. You know that.’

  The tiny barman shook his head in a sudden fit, shaking the image of Triar’s startling blue eyes off his retina. Squatz had been in business a long time, and he was not about to let this fanatic’s cheap conjuring tricks derail him now. Triar was one of the most charming of his patrons, but sometimes it seemed to Squatz that he was a little too charming. His eyes were occasionally a little too bright. Triar himself would dismiss his curiosity, saying that his manner was touched by the glory of the Undying Emperor himself, but Squatz suspected that there was something wyrd in Triar’s ways. He was certain that the adherents outside Triar’s own little gang of Salvationists would not appreciate his secrets.

  ‘Do you know what they are saying under your roof, little man?’ asked Triar, keeping his gaze level and his tone low. ‘They,’ he continued, flicking his head towards the group in the corner, ‘are talking about an archeotech finding that “proves” the Undying Emperor visited Necromunda and that – listen well to this part, little man – he was a she.’

  ‘Oh, you know that I never listen to the private conversations of my patrons, sir,’ mumbled Squatz, trying to sound deferential. ‘Present company excepted, of course,’ he added just in time.

  Triar had just slugged back his shot of Squatz’s house special and slammed the cup down onto the bar. He eyes were beginning to burn and Squatz could see the ‘righteous anger’ building under the so-called Redemptionist’s hood. He wondered for a moment how the young gang leader could be so righteous if he also engaged in so many sins: he was a heavy drinker, a constant profaner, and at least an occasional fornicator. In the same thought, Squatz found himself wondering about Triar’s wyrdness, but that might be a crucial step too far for a Cawdor firebrand, especially for one who called himself the Salvationist. In any case, reasoned Squatz pragmatically, a little sin was good for business.

  ‘Of course,’ replied Triar, his voice set into a hard edge as he turned his back to Squatz and the bar. The blue hoods throughout the room turned in his direction, and he raised an open hand to signal his own readiness. From behind him, Triar could hear the whispered pleas of Squatz: ‘Please, outside.’ And the remaining neutrals in the room fell over each other trying to get out of the door. Only the drunken women seemed oblivious.

  In a sudden movement, Triar clenched his hand into a fist and then pulled it down to his waist. A fraction later and The Breath of Fresh Air erupted into turmoil as the Salvationist gangers pushed and barged their way towards the Escher women of The Coven at the corner table, fighting their way through the fleeing throng of neutrals. Meanwhile, Squatz jumped down behind the bar, not for the first time thankful that he was short enough to be completely shielded by its heavy metal structure.

  Things had not been quite the same since that fateful night a few weeks before, and Krelyn’s routine had been shot to pieces by the suddenly erratic behaviour of that cursed curator. For nearly five years she had been able to rely on his routine. Most importantly, he would leave the Ko’iron librarium through the minor exit tunnel precisely three hours after he clocked off work. Krelyn had been able to make plans for the rest of the night based upon his movements. There were a great many distractions in the luxury of the Spire for a bored venator, and Krelyn relied on them to keep her mind off the life she had lost when House Delaque had cut her off. But her well timetabled displacement activities were no more.

  Over the last few weeks, Curator Tyranus had been leaving at irregular times. Sometimes later than normal and sometimes earlier – once or twice he was not even the last person to leave the building. On three occasions, he had left so early that he hadn’t even used the little exit tunnel opposite the Quake Tavern. Instead, together with the other curators and pledge-workers of the Ko’iron librarium, he had filed out of the great gates that opened into spacious expanse of Hredriea’s Plaza. Krelyn had only been there by chance, taking an unusually circuitous route to her rooftop perch, when she saw the man shuffling along with the others. As she had struggled to confirm that it was him, Krelyn had stifled a chuckle when she saw the clutch of other venators pushing through the crowd and peering over shoulders, checking the same thing. That curator was causing more trouble than he was worth.

  The sudden shift in her mark’s behaviour had made a new series of demands on Krelyn – demands that she had not been required to meet for years. She was not entirely sure that her equipment still functioned well enough to enable her to perform these functions. Most of it, like her goggles, was old and decrepit – it had not been replaced since her masters in House Delaque lost the lucrative Ko’iron Contract nearly ten years before. The collapse of this ancient commercial agreement between one of the houses of Hive City and one of the Spire’s Noble Houses had left Krelyn stranded in the service of the Ko’iron, since she had already given her oath of loyalty to the great Noble House, despite the fact that she could trace her bloodline directly back through the Delaque family itself. She was one of the very few Delaque agents entitled to use the Delaque name. This lineage, at least, did not atrophy with time, even if her equipment did. She would always be Krelyn Delaque. However, a fancy name was not enough, and the venator masters of House Delaque had severed all contacts with House Ko’iron, which also meant cutting off all communication with one of their favourite daughters. Since then, Krelyn had been on her own amongst the ritual and pompous splendour of the Spire, struggling to service her own equipment and to fulfil her obligations to her adopted masters. She wondered whether her brethren in Hive City had forgotten her already.

  The only things that hadn’t fallen apart were her blades, since she had very little use for them in her recent line of work – spying on librarium curators for their own employers. She kept an elaborate array of bladed weapons in a state of highly polished perfection, sharpening them and purifying them every night in her chambers. Each morning, she would fix them against her skin with straps, securing them under specially made slits in her fatigues, so that she could access them quickly if needed.

  Her firearms were a completely different story. She was trained to use them, not to maintain them. A glorious example of a pilfered Van Saar laspistol, perhaps the finest weapon that Krelyn had ever had the good fortune to steal, was displayed in a wrack above her bed. Before she was posted up in the Spire, she had even had the audacity to take it to a House Van Saar weaponsmith to have it customised to her requirements – the butt was extended into a shoulder-brace for better stability on ranged shots, almost transforming it into a rifle. As it was, she could wear it hanging vertically at her side, with a simple strap securing the stock under her armpit. Her cape neatly covered the whole thing. Of course, it didn’t work any more. It had seized up years ago and now it just glimmered like a finely polished ornament in her immaculate and unfashionably sparse chambers.

  When she had first entered the service of the Ko’iron, the young Prince Jurod had been just about to embark on his first hunting jaunt into the Underhive as part of a Spyrer team. Although he was unaware of it, Krelyn had accompanied the young prince, hidden in the shadows, to ensure that no real harm could come to the patriarchal heir apparent. During those months in the slovenly underworld of Hive Primus, Krelyn had silently offered prayers of thanks to the Undying Emperor for her laspistol and her blades. However, as his little sister, Princess Gwentria, had grown up, Jurod had changed his ways and hardly ever ventured onto the other side of the great adamantium Wall that separated the stately abode of the Spire from the vast bulk of the working hive below. And when he did go down, he no longer needed a chaperone. Hence, now, Krelyn’s weapons were little more than memory crutches of a more glorious time.

  She tutted and shook her head, as she crouched in readiness on the rooftop across from the mouth of the librarium’s exit tunnel. Most people in Hive City spend their lives wondering what it would be like to get through the great wall and into the mysterious world of the Spire on the other side. Krelyn would have given anything to trade places with one of those aspiring weaklings. Hive City might be dirty, diseased, chaotic and dangerous, but at least it was alive. The Spire was… she searched for the right word in her head. The Spire was boring.

  A line from that ridiculous book seeped back into her mind: ‘When you look up, there is nothing but the sky.’ It wasn’t true of the Spire and, even if it was, she would hate it.

  Swaying her head to shift the blind spot in her goggles, Krelyn saw the shuffling figure of her curator stooping to sit down at the end of the tunnel, dropping his legs over the edge as he had done hundreds of times before. He was about an hour early, and he looked decidedly agitated. Instead of twisting his
body round to lower himself awkwardly to the ledge, he simply sat for a moment before pushing off with his hands and kicking out with his feet, sending himself flying forward and down towards the ledge. Krelyn could swear that she had seen a flash of anger cross the bookish face an instant before he jumped.

  Curator Tyranus hit the ledge hard and stumbled forwards before falling flat on his face against the rock. He lay where he had fallen for a few seconds, and Krelyn found herself worrying that the stupid man may have hurt himself in that moment of bravado. But, after a while, he pushed himself back up onto his feet and limped off towards the stairs that led down to street level.

  Before Zefer even knew where he was going, he found himself sitting on the marble steps of the Matriarch’s Shrine, picking at his fingernails in the half-light and mumbling incoherently. A thin trickle of blood was working its way down from the corner of his mouth, and his leg was burning with pain. He couldn’t remember walking past the Quake Tavern, but he must have done in order to get to the shrine.

  Behind him, the towering statue of Hredriea, the maternal grandmother of Gwentria, the current Ko’iron matriarch, loomed regally over the plaza. The shrine had been built two hundred years before as a testament to the power of the female line of the Ko’iron family. The history books in aisle 2.81.4527c of the librarium told of how the shrine had been commissioned by Hredriea herself, following a huge hive-quake that had destroyed much of what is now Gwentria’s Fringe. Evidently, all of the construction work had been done by the female pledged-workers of House Ko’iron itself. Hredriea’s idea had been to build a monument to the glory of the Undying Emperor that tied her family intimately to his patronage. So, she herself stood as the guardian to the shrine, and her immense statue at the crest of the steps dwarfed the pale stone of the Emperor’s image in the temple building itself.

  Zefer often came to sit on these magnificent steps, usually in the middle of the day, when the plaza would be bustling with merchants and the vibrancy characteristic of this affluent district. The square was flanked on three sides by shimmering white marble buildings, each with intricately castellated rooflines, sprinklings of potent gargoyles, and gloriously soaring arches. This district had found its wealth under the protection of Hredriea and it had thenceforth maintained its association with the Ko’iron women, just as it had maintained its reputation as one of the most affluent quarters under House Ko’iron’s control. It was, in any case, unusual because of the natural light that seeped in during the day through the huge stained glass windows set into the thick exterior wall of the Spire that curved slightly around the back of the shrine. Of course, the cloud belt took the edge off the sunlight, and the torches in the streetlights burned all through the day to ensure that there was enough light, but the glow of the sky outside gave the stained glass an eerie radiance found nowhere else in the Spire. At night, the ancient and colourful windows were floodlit from giant spotlights set into the marble steps. Zefer sat between them, with their beams criss-crossing into a web behind him.

  A group of chattering youths bumped and stumbled through the plaza, supporting themselves on each others shoulders as they sang wordless songs in a jumbled chorus. The noise made Zefer look up out of his bitter reverie and he realised that what he really needed was a drink.

  Elria bit down on the zip-tab, cracking its membrane and flooding her system with an eclectic collection of stimulants. They kicked her metabolism into overdrive just as the group of Salvationist gangers reached the table. She threw her head forwards, thrashing her blue dreads down between her knees and reaching up into the thick hair with her hands. As she flicked her head back, the dreads rushed back into place revealing vicious, gleaming blades in Elria’s hands.

  She was on her feet in an instant, standing on the seat of her chair with her arms outstretched to her sides, pointing the blades menacingly at the blue-cloaked gangers who were trying to flank the table.

  As she moved, the rest of the women at the table leapt to their feet, crunching their tabs and spinning on their heels to face the approaching blue hoods. Their drunken abandon was instantly replaced by lethal focus, and their readiness startled the advancing gangers.

  Seeing his men stall, Triar leapt up onto the bar and pulled the long-bladed dagger out of his boot, flourishing it ostentatiously from hand to hand. He pointed its gleaming tip at the flamboyant figure of Elria, standing dramatically on her chair in the corner.

  ‘This witch is sowing decay into the souls of the weak and the helpless! Is it not enough that she blasphemes against the divine form by outlawing men from her House? Now, it seems, she blasphemes against the Undying Emperor himself – concocting and disseminating apocryphal stories that he was a woman!’

  ‘This man,’ countered Elria, her head turned to the side as she surveyed the scene out of the corner of her eyes through a curtain of blue hair, ‘would have you surrender your thoughts to the soulless idol of a best forgotten faith. He is simply the deluded representative of an anachronistic, patriarchal system. Why not believe that the Emperor was a woman, if that will bring liberty to your life?’

  In his hiding place behind the bar, Squatz slapped himself in the head. Why did they always spurt such nonsense at each other? If they were going to fight, why not just get on with it? And why wouldn’t they go outside? He was pleased, at least, that they appeared to have honoured their vows not to bring guns into the Fresh Air.

  ‘If you have proof of your heresy, bring it forth and show us the error of our “deluded” ways,’ taunted Triar, dropping the tip of his blade into a mocking shrug, appealing to the crowd in this piece of amateur theatre.

  ‘We have as much proof that she was a woman as you have that he was a man,’ retorted Elria, still watching out of the corner of her eye and hardly moving at all. Around her, the Escher women remained completely stationary, perfectly focussed and unfazed by their plight.

  ‘There are centuries of records that support our position, Elria Escher, and none at all in support of yours.’ Triar was laughing behind his mask, and his blade tip was now pointing at his feet. ‘You will not find a curator in all of Necromunda who would take you seriously. And,’ he added, snapping his blade back out towards her, ‘you will not find a Redemptionist who would not take your head for heresy.’

  ‘Your records mean nothing to me, Triar Cawdor, and your faith in the mettle of the Redemptionists is pathetically misplaced… as you are about to discover, again.’ Elria added the last word with some venom, turning her eyes to face the ganger directly as though to reinforce her point. Her red eyes shone unnaturally for a fraction of a second, and then the bar on which Triar was standing burst into flames.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Zefer, throwing the message tube down on the official’s desk. It was early in the new working day, and Zefer had hardly slept the previous night.

  ‘It’s very simple,’ replied the senioris, unrolling the paper and inspecting the text in a dismissive and cursory manner. ‘This is your response.’

  ‘But it’s not a response at all!’ cried Zefer, nearly shouting.

  ‘It may not be the response you wanted, but it is still a response,’ replied the senioris with irritating and implacable calm.

  ‘But… but it’s just the report that I sent to them. They haven’t even stamped it to show that it has been read,’ continued Zefer, refusing to believe that this was really the end of the story.

  ‘It should be of no concern to you whether it has been read or not, curator...’ The official scanned the report for a name. ‘Curator Zefer Tyranus. Is it not enough to know that you have done your duty by submitting the report in the first place?’ The senioris looked up from his desk for the first time and stared at Zefer. He did an obvious and startled double-take. ‘What happened to you?’

  Zefer glared down at the officious man, seated so comfortably behind his protocols. There wasn’t even a name plate on the desk, just a little plaque with the words ‘Duty Senioris,’ etched into it. This was certainly the longest conversation that he had ever had with a senior official in the librarium, and it was not going quite as he had imagined that it might.