Assassinorum kingmaker, p.18
Assassinorum Kingmaker, page 18
‘Suppose you’re right.’ Rakkan sucked air through his teeth. ‘Let’s just hope our man doesn’t take matters into his own hands if there’s been an exposure – he saved me with the dogs. More pertinently, dear mother’s opinion on Imperial ties was… enlightening. Borderline secessionism.’
‘The talk at this party is much less restrained than I’m used to.’ Koln bowed, keeping the outward appearance of subservience for the benefit of onlookers. ‘I’ve placed a few micro-voxes in the environment and the servants’ halls. Later audio analysis will be needed to harden determination but the public belief seems to be that you’re not fully independent, Sir Rakkan. That your move into court is part of a stratagem by Stryder.’
Rakkan grunted. ‘Well, Baroness Hawthorn leads the house. It would be hard to see it differently. We’ll have to balance that, won’t we?’
‘Access is our primary concern. Can’t be cut off from half the court. If it’s all right with you, I might suggest you talk to your uncle, Baron Kraine. With your mother, that would be the two heads of house contacted within a single evening.’
She nodded across the hall, across the moat and to a knot of red-tabarded courtiers gathered around a tall man with a black forked beard, a blue tattoo crossing his forehead like a circlet.
‘Good plan,’ said Rakkan. ‘But stay close.’
‘Why?’
Rakkan pointed towards a pair of nobles shouting insults across the moat. One, a smallish Rau woman with a short haircut, threw a vin goblet that splashed across the Stryder man’s tunic. Shouts rose above the general buzz of conversation, causing the crowd to turn like hunting birds towards prey.
‘Because I think someone’s about to die.’
‘Let us hope,’ said Koln, ‘that it’s not us.’
TWENTY-THREE
As Rakkan turned to step through the hatch to his room, he saw the first stablight beam fan across the interior of the galley he had retreated from. The light beam traversed the space, dappling over the crew table and the cups of eating utensils set into it. When it hit them, it threw their shadows unnaturally long across the tabletop, the cup of forks sprouting a hedge of dark thorns like in the goblin stories. The knives stretching into dark swords.
Then it fell on the uncorked amasec bottle and abandoned glass.
Rakkan had not made it to the safe room. Instead, he shuffled into the humid dark of his own cabin, pushing the heavy door closed an inch at a time so it did not…
The hinges hit the sticking point and howled.
Running feet. Leather boots on metal decking.
Rakkan leaned into the door, put his shoulder into it to both keep him upright and slam it, one hand fiddling for the lock.
Instead, he found another hand. Leather-gloved, curling around the side.
He slammed himself into the door and heard a yowl as the hatch mashed the man’s fingers. Rakkan put his back into it and shoved again, hearing the brittle snap of skeletal digits.
It gave him time. Time to fumble with the crook of his left crutch, the one the Imperial agents had never examined closely. He pressed the catch-stud and the saddle came free, the curve of its padded surface fitting his hand perfectly. He slid the long duelling barrel free, the folded trigger springing out and locking with a click.
The man on the other side of the door heaved, sending Rakkan sprawling backward.
He landed in the room’s rotating chair, only staying upright because it was bolted to the floor.
A dark figure came at him, the red ammo runes of a pistol like a predator’s eye in the darkness.
Rakkan’s concealed laspistol was already levelled, two-handed. His fall into the chair had taken him below the assailant’s firing line.
Rakkan’s first shot lit the cabin red for a brief instant. He saw a footman in unmarked black livery, wearing a de-burnished breastplate and helmet common to the household guard. It holed his breastplate just below the sternum, boring a black hole through him.
Second flash, the shot hitting higher this time. Glanced off the top of his breastplate and ricocheted up and under his chin. The footman’s head snapped back and he tumbled into the corridor, twitching.
He fell nearly into the arms of a second man, tangling up his primitive las-lock. Rakkan put two shots into him, the first burning a smear onto the bulkhead behind him, the second drilling his shoulder. The man screamed and writhed on the floor, the red-lit corridor smoky from the las-discharge.
The crutch-pistol’s powercell was big. It took up the whole of the crutch saddle it was contained in. Rakkan could hold out a long time. He fired another shot towards the side of the door to make the point.
‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Take your damn men and go.’
Instead, a heavy metal object clattered into the room, nudging his numb feet.
Rakkan didn’t realise it was a grenade until the room filled with noise.
‘What started it?’ asked Koln as she watched the two nobles inspect their rapiers.
They were standing back, outside the crowd so they could speak with some privacy and allow Sycorax’s personality to re-emerge with minimal danger. The shouting had led to a blow, then challenges, and now the two stood on the bridge over the divided hall, the soles of their boots seeming to float a few inches above the heads of the boisterous crowd.
‘I heard the one on the right, the Rau one,’ Sycorax murmured, nodding at the black-haired woman who was looking down the tang of her blade. She was a serious type, hair cut short to her shoulders, perhaps in imitation of the Adepta Sororitas. It was both fetching and severe, complementing her angular frame and catlike eyes. ‘She said that at the tournament she would put her feet on the other’s Knight suit.’
Koln clicked her tongue. ‘A great insult. One of the worst. My family tree is a bit outdated, but I do believe she’s Lidya Vossa, pilot of Stormrider. Baron Kraine’s daughter. Making her your first cousin.’
‘Everyone’s my cousin,’ Sycorax scoffed. ‘And the other, the boy?’ She nodded at the young man on the other side of the bridge, who was seating his leather gloves and shaking out his shoulders.
‘Sir Ishmayl Galvan,’ Koln answered. ‘Pilot of the Armiger Helverin Skystrike.’
‘Dear mother’s squire.’
Galvan was fair and pleasant to look at, hair parted off-centre and falling to one side like a breaking wave – his moustache, though, was not thick enough to be really convincing.
‘Throne,’ said Sycorax. ‘They’re barely of age. Must be sixteen, seventeen at most.’
‘We weren’t much older.’
She tilted Rakkan’s head, pursed his lips. ‘True.’
Baroness Hawthorn stepped up onto one side of the bridge, and Baron Kraine the other.
‘State your reason for challenge,’ said Kraine.
Galvan pointed at his opponent, slicing his rapier through the air. ‘This loathsome villain–’
‘Keep it brief,’ interrupted Hawthorn. ‘State your grievance.’
‘She threatened to deface the honoured Knight suit Skystrike. To place her feet upon it, wipe her hands on its banners. Spit on its weapon mounts.’
‘Can anyone swear oath that she spoke thus?’ asked Hawthorn. A scatter of hands raised on the Stryder side. ‘And you, young lady, what say you?’
Vossa grinned. ‘He has stolen the words out of my mouth, baroness – just as his house stole the planet from beneath our feet. Now both will answer.’
Cheers from the Rau side, greeted by a wall of hisses.
Baron Kraine, Rakkan noticed, was not quite so cavalier. He dropped a hand on his daughter’s shoulder, as if trying to restrain her.
Or, Sycorax thought, to have one last touch.
The baron raised his voice. ‘Must we do this, Hawthorn? Is it not enough that their footmen skirmish in the palace? Do we need to mar this happy occasion with your nephew’s death?’
‘Ah,’ said Hawthorn. ‘We are playing to death then – I had expected it to be blood, but if you want to send little Vossa to the ancestors I will not stop you. But either we must accept your apology, or you accept our challenge.’
Kraine whispered in his daughter’s ear, but she shrugged his guiding hand off her shoulder.
‘On behalf of house and ancestors,’ she said, dropping into a guard stance and raising her weapon, ‘I accept your challenge!’
Hawthorn and Kraine stepped away amid the roar.
‘Kraine muttered something,’ said Sycorax. ‘As he stepped away. Did you get a read on his lips?’
‘Stupid,’ said Koln. ‘He said don’t be stupid.’
Then the fencers stepped forward and the blades met with a stinging clash.
The slap rocked Rakkan’s head back. Brought him out of the muffled comfort of unconsciousness and back into the world of red light and blood.
Rakkan’s vision blurred and drifted, doubling the man in front of him.
‘Good morrow, Sir Rakkan,’ the blur sneered. ‘How strange to find you here.’
Rakkan responded by voiding his stomach on the man’s shoes.
It wasn’t intentional. Between the amasec, the stress response, and the smell of las-bolt-cooked flesh it was nearly inevitable – but his captor hit him anyway. Bright lights in his face, dazzling him. Not the compact stablights Guardsmen fixed to their lasguns or the headlamps of the granite mines of the northern hemisphere – these were chunky and barrel-shaped, their faces as big as a saucer.
If they hit him with one, Rakkan reflected, it would break his neck.
The questioner passed in front of the stablight, betraying his silhouette for a moment. Rakkan got the impression of broad shoulders and forearms thick with hair. The big man dragged a chair over and sat so close their toes touched. Rakkan smelled breath made rich and thick by spiced mutton and a coal-pipe habit.
‘I have a quandary for you, Sir Rakkan.’
He paused, and Rakkan saw a glowing orange point in the light-washed darkness. A pipe. Rakkan could smell the sweet smoke, the coal plug soaked in barandictine liquor.
‘You’ – Rakkan felt a tap on his chest, and realised it was the pipe stem – ‘are as of this very minute being banqueted in the great hall. And yet, here you are.’
Click of pipe on teeth. The orange glow again.
‘Do you know Saint Cederic?’
Rakkan said nothing. Though he did know the old folk stories. They were pre-Imperial. A favourite among Dominionites, so much so that the Ministorum had successfully petitioned to make the local hero a minor saint – hoping that elevating a familiar figure would assist in conversion efforts.
‘My old pater, he used to talk about how wily Cederic could be two places at once – fooling heretics into confessing up in the Stryder lands, while leading prayers in the domain of Rau. Know you that story?’
Rakkan said nothing.
‘Are you a saint, Rakkan?’
Rakkan laughed, despite himself. Shook his head.
‘So it’s witchcraft then.’ The questioner clicked his tongue. ‘You know we burn witches here, sir. Have since time immemorial. That’s why we survived the Age of Strife, when all those other worlds ignited with psyker eruptions. We torched the witches. Fire and blood, eh?’
The questioner stepped hard on one of Rakkan’s shoes, then the other.
Rakkan felt a thump on his lap, saw the orange coal between his legs. Felt the searing pain of the lit plug burning through his trousers, the fabric under it blackening and curling away, with threads of orange around the expanding hole.
Instinct sent his hands flying to his lap, but the questioner grabbed and held them together. The smoker tried to force Rakkan’s arms down, but after years on crutches and braces, the pilot’s upper body strength was massive. The smoker grunted, and two footmen holding the lights put them on the deck and took his hands, each forcing an arm until the clenched fists rested knuckle to knuckle on the back of his neck.
Rakkan fought them, but it was hard to win a contest of strength when you could smell your own flesh cooking. Rakkan tried to jump his legs and throw the coal off, but without his braces, what leg muscles could respond were no match for the questioner’s feet pinning them to the ground.
He fought the panic that clawed and convulsed in his gut. Breathed. Acknowledged the pain. Divorced his emotion and terror from the raw feeling. It was a familiar exercise – he’d had to do it before, when Gwynne built his augmetic braces and ran him through exercises as he learned to walk again.
Take the fear out of it, and Rakkan was well used to pain.
Instead, he focused on the smoker’s face. He could see it now, between the ghostly after-images of the stablights that still floated in his vision.
He was a footman, Rakkan was sure of that. But one with a high rank. Possibly even a minor noble. The man was older, perhaps fifty, with a pitted face covered by a large mutton-chop beard that met above his thin lip. He smiled a bit, two teeth on the right worn halfway down where he seated his pipe.
Rakkan memorised the face. Thought about how he would draw it. He’d sketched as a child, still did on occasion. He met the man’s eyes with hate.
‘Tell us who you are,’ the interrogator said. ‘And how there are two of you, and this can end.’
Rakkan said nothing.
The smoker shrugged, and leaned down, using his pipe stem to nudge the coal an inch towards Rakkan’s crotch. It was blackening, cooling. He pursed his lips and blew, flaring the little lump orange again.
Rakkan took another breath, growled as he let it out, settling into this new pain. Sweat slid down his brow and into his eyes. For the first time, he thanked the Throne that he’d drunk too much. Between that, the numbness of his injury, and his deep knowledge of managing pain, he could keep this up.
Not for long. But at least for a time.
‘Come now, you know I don’t like doing this,’ said the smoker. ‘Terrible, this kind of thing. Unpleasant for both of us. I’d just as soon get it over with. Because when that glowing little beauty reaches where it’s going, you’re going to squawk. And if you don’t, you’ll regret it.’
Rakkan knew it. And the pain was rising, along with the panic. The second one was the worst. He could feel it clawing up his throat from his belly, throttling him. Hitching his breath. Cutting off the supply of oxygen that was the lifeline keeping him calm.
‘Who are you running this farce for, eh? Rau? Stryder? A member of court? The Inquisition?’
The smoker pushed the coal closer.
‘You don’t understand,’ Rakkan said, tasting the tears that flowed freely down his face. ‘These people. You don’t know.’
‘What people? Specifics, sir Knight. What don’t I know?’
‘They’re terrifying.’
‘I’m terrifying, goodsire.’ He reached down to push the coal the last inch.
‘Not like them,’ said Rakkan. ‘Not like them.’
Outside, a body clanged against the bulkhead.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘When does a law come into being? When it is written? No. A law is merely ink on paper until it is used. It is the swing of a headsman’s axe that conjures it into reality. A law comes into force when you apply exactly that – force. Fail to enforce the law, and it is broken.’
– Lucien Yavarius-Khau, High Monarch of Dominion, from his Meditations on the Code Chivalric
Lidya Vossa scored the first hit, a savage lunge that brought her so far onto her front knee that the back of her calf and thigh touched, her long blade whickering in beneath the boy’s guard and plunging into his chest.
The audience exploded, one side with cheers, and the other as if they’d been struck collectively in the stomach. The wind driven out of them.
Galvan hammered the pommel of his rapier down into Vossa’s skull with a crack that reversed the noise – raising shouts from the Rau side and stunned cheers from Stryder.
The fighters parted, Galvan with a hand to the dark stain spreading on his jacket, Vossa with a wrist to her brow. When she removed it, a trickle of blood rolled down her pale face and collected in her eyebrow. They each retired to their sides of the bridge, as Hawthorn and Kraine assessed whether either injury was a mortal wound.
‘Glancing hits, both of them,’ mused Sycorax. Of all the assassins, she was the expert fencer. ‘He twisted at the last minute, got pierced but managed to keep the blade outside of his ribcage. She twitched her head so the pommel strike didn’t fall square.’
‘They learned from the Balrissi-Cadmus manuals,’ said Koln. ‘Very good form.’
‘That’s the problem,’ said Sycorax. ‘Neither are very good. Good at drills and stances and technicals, sure. But they’re playing regicide rather than fighting. Too ritualised. Doing everything like it was taught. Trying to outthink each other when they should be trying to out-feel each other.’
‘I can think of a certain colleague who might like their regimented approach,’ said Koln.
‘Vossa has a little spontaneity – it was a good lunge.’
‘You think so?’ said a man, sliding up on Sycorax’s right side. He wore bisected livery on his silver-chased doublet. An eyepatch, embroidered with a stylised lightning bolt, rested over one eye. ‘It’s been a long time, Linoleus.’
‘Well met, Mauvec,’ Sycorax said, fully submerging into the legend. Rakkan held out his hand and grasped the man’s forearm, hoping Baroness Hawthorn hadn’t been right when she’d said the man would break his fingers. ‘Sir Mauvec Kawe, may I present Engine-Master Axanda Dak of the Verser trade consortium. Engine-master, this is my cousin Mauvec Kawe, my competitor in the Lists. If one could even call it a competition.’
