"Lord of the Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Спуриэр Саймон)

Mita Ashyn

Hemmed on all sides by drooping adamantium walls, the force of Herniatown's devastation erupted not outwards, but upwards.

Above Herniatown stood Cuspseal.

Mita had returned to the lower tiers from the under-city beneath a stormcloud of suspicion and fear. The psychic resonance of the murdered woman — a spectral shadow that only she had felt — had affected her profoundly, and as Sergeant Varitens stalked off to report to his commander she had hastened to a control room at the precinct's peak, pushing aside servitors and tech-acolytes in her haste to reach the communications consoles.

She was thus ensconced, struggling with the infuriating business of conferring with Inquisitor Kaustus, when the quake hit. It had almost been a relief.

Given that the hivelink — a mass of switchboard feeds crammed amongst ducts city-wide — was prone to broken signals and interferences, and that the control room's bustle was as endless as it was raucous, she had expected Kaustus's quiet tones to be rendered inaudible. As it was, his reaction to Mita's report was easily gauged despite its volume: describing to him the particulars of the murders had been an object lesson in futility, and his voice had dripped with an utter lack of interest. She began to appreciate why Orodai had insisted she see the slaughter for herself. Mere words could not hope to describe it.

'...desecration on a... a savage scale, my lord, and—'

'Savage, you say?' his clipped tones had dripped with scorn. 'And in the underhive, no less? Imagine that.'

She'd fancied she could hear him rolling his eyes.

'My lord, I... I know it must seem... insignificant, and perhaps my regard for it appears ridiculous to you, but—'

'It does not appear ridiculous, girl. It is ridiculous. Worse, it is a waste of my time. Murders in the underhive! You're a servant of the Inquisition, not some underling lawman sent to solve every tawdry crime.' He huffed loudly, and Mita had imagined him toying with the tip of one polished tusk. 'You will in future not burden me with every tedious item of detail that y—'

'But my lord, I felt such darkness! It... it hangs like a cloud! A shadow in the warp!'

The link's brass speaker, fashioned in the shape of a gasping fish, fell silent. Mita had stared at it, uncertain. Had he severed the connection?

'M-my lord?'

Kaustus's voice had been cold when at last he spoke.

'You will never interrupt me again. Is that quite clear?'

Her stomach had knotted. 'O-of course, my lord. My apologies.'

'My patience has limits, child. Do not test them.'

'I am sorry, my lord, truly... It's just that...' she'd fumbled for words, the memory of the body twisting her guts, flickering before her. Its naked shape haunted every blink and its empty eyes — hollows that led only to shadow — regarded her mutely from her own mind. Should she say it? Should she voice her suspicions? By the Throne, she'd been so sure, but now that she came to it, now that it needed to be spoken, suddenly it sounded ludicrous. Melodramatic. Too much.

But the words!

Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus, Ave Dominus Nox.

The words had filled her with such certainty that she'd all but screamed her fears when she saw them, biting her tongue all the way back to Cuspseal, desperate to tell her master.

She must tell him. She must.

In the control room, staring at the voicetube with her stomach churning, she'd taken a breath, composed herself, injected formality into her tone, and said it.

'Inquisitor, it is my belief that the taint is abroad within the hive.'

This time the pause had dragged long and deep, and when he spoke Kaustus's voice was so quiet that she'd strained to hear his words.

'Chaos?' he'd whispered. 'You think the city harbours Chaos?'

She'd choked back a retch at the very word, and had gripped the speakertube as if clinging for dear life.

'Yes, my lord,' she said, committed. 'Or... or something like it, Emperor preserve.'

'Interrogator Ashyn,' Kaustus had said finally, and it seemed to Mita that a strange new element had entered his tone, a hint of ice that had not registered before. 'We are servants of the Ordo Xenos. We have come to this world to unmask the cancer that is xenophilia. That is the course we shall pursue.'

'But—'

'You are young, interrogator. Already you have served two masters. You lack continuity. You lack experience. You are unqualified in the ways of Chaos.'

'But... my lord,' she'd struggled with the plug of frustration in her throat. Why could he not trust her? What reason could he have for such belligerence? 'My lord, I feel it. I sense it. It stalks the shadows...'

'That,' and his voice had allowed no room for argument, no hope of persuasion, 'is not in your power to diagnose. Is that all, interrogator? Or do you have more spurious assertions to make?'

Standing there with mouth agape, a forked pathway had presented itself to her, and she had closed her eyes to explore its shimmering angles. Beyond the guiding techniques of the psi-trance, without even consulting the lesser arcanoi of the Imperial tarot, she knew that such echoes of the future — uninvited and uncontrolled — should be mistrusted. They presented fickle visions of what might be, writhing on skeins of chance, and the adept-tutors at the Scholia Psykana had warned their charges to be wary of their deceptions.

Nonetheless, the options had been as vibrant as had she been seated in her meditation cell, and she'd regarded them with the tranquillity of a practiced, competent psyker.

On the one hand she could return to her master's side. She could kow-tow to his desires, disregard her own judgements, suppress the condemnation of his eccentricities and accept his authority. She could trust in his righteousness and serve him with the devotion his rank deserved. In time, she could see, she would gain a portion of his respect.

Or she could believe what her heart told her: a path that ran ragged with uncertainty, violence and blood.

And glory.

'My lord,' she'd said, enslaved to her ambition. 'I would ask your blessing in undertaking a hunt.'

'A hunt.'

'Yes my lord. For the killer.'

The speaker crackled softly, as if astonished by her request.

'Interrogator,' it said eventually. 'Either your brain is addled by the crudity of your surroundings or your insolence is greater even than I had feared. Your request is d—'

And then the connection had broken, the lights flickered, and the world turned on its head.

The way Mita saw it — during the hours of madness that followed the quake — an interrupted refusal was no refusal at all.

In a metropolis as densely populated as the hive, any upheaval causing fatalities in the mere hundreds could barely be considered calamitous. Nor was Cuspseal's regimented architecture overly disturbed by the subterranean blast: its buttresses and spindled towers continued to stand, its bleak factories barely paused in their ceaseless grind, and its cabled walkways simply swayed before resuming their sprawl. And if here or there a habstack found its view altered, or a chapel leaned from its foundation where before it stood proud, then the teeming masses could be relied upon to shrug and thank the Emperor-on-high that the quake had not been more devastating. The ancientness of this skyless place weighed heavily, and deep in their hearts each hiver felt its fragility keenly. It was a house of cards, a tower of glass, and would require but one carelessly cast stone to crumble.

The floor of Cuspseal had developed a tumour. Where centuries before Herniatown had sagged into the shadows, now it had returned in contempt of those baroque towers built on its spine. It shrugged off the habs and trams and levered itself upright, its ceiling bulging from the Cuspseal foundation like some malign growth. It was here, at the disaster's epicentre, that the loss of life was greatest: hivers tumbling from splintered roads, crushed between pounding slabs. Dust boiled up and out like a living thing, breeding a race of staggering mud-caked zombies. In places the rising hillock split, plumes of molten metal rising from its rents, and there the explosion could vent itself, great tongues of fire licking the bases of gantries above. The stink of flesh wrestled with screams of terror for dominance, and for a brief hour Cuspseal resounded not with the usual factorial tumult, but with the sights and scents of a warzone.

It was perhaps a reflection of hive existence that the city barely paused in its industry at the quake's arrival. In the tier above it, or a single kilometre to either side, there the hive was as oblivious as was Governor Zagrif himself, insulated in the hive's peak. If any aristocrat from Steepletown found his apartments powerless for the instant it took ancient rerouters to correct the blip, or if some high-tier merchantman discovered his flow of mouldpaste interrupted before he could reassign his contracts, then such things could be attributed to the whims of the hive ghosts, or the will of the Emperor, or — at the very least — to just another aspect of the creaking, ineffective workings of hive life.

Cuspseal was all but back to normal within two hours, and the only factor of any note to have changed was the spiralling determination of a single woman to investigate exactly what was going on in the underhive.

'You want what?'

'You heard me. A squad of twenty men. Fully armed, fully armoured.'

'I see.' Commander Orodai sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, raising an ironic eyebrow. 'Anything else? A set of wings?'

Mita waved a dismissive hand. She'd been too patronised by far less pleasant individuals to be bothered by Orodai's sarcasm.

'I think the men will suffice, for now. And a vehicle, of course.'

He nodded with false earnestness. 'Naturally.'

Orodai's office was a barren space, windowless, made all the less welcoming by the indistinct rusding of servitors in the shadows beyond his desk. Evidently the commander travelled often between the precincts beneath his control, and only his staff of mindless scribes remained constant.

'Save your sarcasm, commander. Whether it pleases you or not, this request carries the full weight of the Inquisition's authority, an—'

'Ha, yes. And is therefore not a "request" at all. It's a demand, girl, and you'd be better off calling it by name. I haven't time for your niceties.'

'Call it what you want. It's all the same in the end.'

Orodai regarded her beneath heavy brows, as if weighing her character by her looks alone. Judging by the taste of his thoughts, he didn't regard either with fondness.

'Let us pretend,' he said, 'that I give you what you want. What sort of madness are you planning on leading my men into?'

'We go to hunt the killer, commander.' This time it was her turn to cock an eyebrow. 'You remember? The one you invited our aid in capturing?'

'I remember. And I remember inviting aid to spare my men the trouble, not to draw them away from more important du—'

'Ah... Then you consider the Inquisition fit only for insignificant pursuits?'

'That's not what I—'

'But you just said as much.' She crossed her arms. 'If I were less charitable, I might consider that assertion to border on the heretical...'

She left the veiled threat dangling, watching him carefully.

He knew he was beaten. And in his thoughts — which of course he believed to be entirely private — he cursed her venomously. Inwardly, Mita joined him, briefly hating herself for steamrollering the objections of such a fundamentally honest man. She assuaged her guilt by reminding herself of the mission's importance. She could brook no concessions, no compromises.

'Fine,' Orodai snapped, hunching forward in his seat. 'Have the damned men. But how you plan to find a single killer amongst a multitude is a trick I'd love to know.'

She half smiled, dipping in a bow of genuine gratitude. 'I have my ways.'

'You'll need them,' he said, unimpressed. 'That quake started below. It's going to be messy down there, girl. Messy and mad.'

Orodai's predictions were unerringly accurate.

It was as if the subterranean blast had expelled not only fire and ash, but some indiscernible smog of insanity. In every settlement around the ruined husk of Hemiatown, across every sumpflow and debris-dune, madness had spilled out from the shadows to reclaim its domain.

Most visible amongst the agents of lunacy were the Purgatists — sinister preachers enmeshed in suits of barbs and bones, lashing at the groaning crowds with hook-tipped whipcords. They prophesied the Emperor's return in a hail of blood and smoke, and attested in crazed tones to his wrath. In the city above Mita had noticed advocates of the movement on street corners and mezzanine junctions: moderates with earnest voices and scarred faces, the marks of quiet zeal and self-flagellation.

Not so in the undercity, where eccentricity bred delusion and piety begot fanaticism.

The Purgatists here yelped and howled, struck at the willing crowd, set alight pyres containing ''mutants'' and ''witches'', and cast quivering fingers towards where Herniatown had once stood, citing the Emperor's splendid venom as the force that had purged so utterly the Glacier Rat filth.

Passing by the lunatic zealots, Mita couldn't prevent a guilty thought from seeping through her defences: Is insanity the price of faith?

The deranged-but-pious were not alone in seizing the prospects presented by the explosion. To the gangs the explosion marked not only a territorial opportunity in the Glacier Rats' wake, but a power vacuum. Total war had come to the underhive.

The crackle of distant gunfire struggled to be heard above the shouts of combatants and the thunder of collapsing buildings, gutted by fire or otherwise undermined. On several occasions gangers themselves, flamboyantly dressed in the colours of their pack, appeared beside the debrisflows to snap off a few optimistic rounds at the vindictors in their trio of Salamanders, before vanishing into their warrens like ghosts. Mita thought it somehow exotic: like jewelled wildlife glimpsed at a forest's edge.

The vindictors, of course, endured these sightings with less sentimentality, taking turns to rise into the Salamanders' open-topped diases, vying to pick off those unfortunates unable to seek cover. Mita endured the noisy distractions poorly, struggling to remain focused.

In less enlightened times a hunter might follow a trail of prints, or spend days pursuing rumours and sightings. To Mita such crudities were unthinkable: the maelstrom of emotion that comprised the psychic environment was as perceptible to her as the scorched earth of its roads or the buckled struts of its walls. The shadow she sought — an oilslick of malign influence and, yes... yes, she was certain, the taint — wound its way throughout like a spectral cord. Whether it represented the killer's exact trail or not was irrelevant, its loci were places he had been, its tentacles were the paths of people he had stalked. Without a clue as to who or what the killer was, she nonetheless tracked his flavour, she followed the strings of his emotion, blossoming and nebulising in his wake. He was angry.

Angry, and cold and bitter.

'Right at the junction,' she instructed the Salamander's pilot, eyelids closed, and watched the manoeuvre through a spectrum that employed neither light nor colour.

The trail had led them on a merry dance already, and she dimly suspected the Preafects thought she was inventing as she went. She couldn't care less.

Their first destination, against Sergeant Varitens's noisy protests, had been the perimeter of the contested zone itself, where Herniatown had once stood. That pulverised area of metallic slag and scorched earth — its walls and ceilings presenting not a single straight line or right angle in their fractured surfaces — had clamoured in her mind with the darkness she'd been seeking, and briefly she'd thought the killer must have died in the inferno. He'd been present, she had no doubt of that. When Herniatown belched itself out of existence he'd been there, at the thick of whatever action had transpired, and she considered the possibility of his death with an uncomfortable thrill of disappointment.

But, no... The trail had reappeared, coal-black, leading away from the ruined zone into the darkness of the western caverns. She led the convoy away from the petty gang squabbles, away from the central settlements with their vestiges of civilisation and their ranting Purgatists, and she resumed the hunt with guilty pleasure.

It had not taken the Preafects long to grasp the reality of their leader's psychic gifts. Mita guessed that had it not been for Cog's silent presence, great machine-hands clenching and unclenching around the autocannon trigger on the tank, their regard for her authority might have been less complete. As it was, they did what she told them when she told them, throwing nervous glances towards the giant — and if they did so without the salutes they would have offered their own commanders it was a detail she was happy to forgo. The one remaining irritation was the interminable mumbling of Sergeant Varitens, who insisted on standing beside her, arms crossed, as if keeping her in his sights could keep her (clearly heretical) mutation in check.

She huffed at the off-putting mussitation — a prayer, she guessed — and refocused, fighting the exhaustion that such intense meditation inevitably caused.

The killer's influence wended its way through a knot of twisting alleys — a filigree of black and blue on the very cusp of her psychic sight — and she guided the pilot through with a calm voice, ignoring the hammering of opportunistic bullets on the tank's sides. As the vehicle clambered from the labyrinth onto a rising steppe of detritus, tracks struggling for purchase, an uncomfortable silence settled, leaving her alone with only the sound of the Salamanders' engines.

Strange shapes loomed in the dark, and at first she mistook them for mighty oaks, grown beyond normal scale, their branches rising above, ghostly lights adorning their tips. Only when perspective adjusted itself in her mind that her eyes decoded what they were seeing.

Vast ducts, each a hundred metres across, littered with scaffold and piping, branching in myriad patterns between floor and cavernous ceiling. At odd points on their colossal trunks hellish lights blazed angry red, steam geysering from every rent, and Mita realised with a stab of amazement that she was seeing thermal ducts, siphoning heat from the planet's crust where even the frozen fluctuations of its weather could not hope to diminish it. From below the entire hive drank the warmth of Equixus, and as the vehicles passed by she found herself humbled, forgetting for an instant the trail she followed.

Varitens's mutterings finally snapped both introspection and temper.

'Sergeant, for the love of the Emperor, would you be quiet.'

He glared, helmet clenched between nervous fingers.

'It's come to a bad thing,' he grumbled, 'when a soldier's denied a prayer for his soul.'

'You feel the need to pray?' she scowled, curling a lip. 'You have twenty men with unfeasibly large weapons standing right behind you, sergeant. What's to be afraid of?'

At this his grizzled mouth twitched in a pale imitation of a smile. Even afflicted by terrors of his own, the prospect of highlighting her ignorance was too delicious for him to pass up.

'This here is the Steel Forest, girl,' he said, nodding out into the canopy of tangled pipes and pilot lights.

'You told me you didn't know any names.'

'And I don't — unless they happen to be the sorts of places it's best to avoid.' He turned towards the viewing slot, glaring out into the dark. 'This is where you'll find the Shadowkin. And they don't much like intruders.'