Chapter 3 continued
He sat in his chair and waited.
Brecht surveyed his study slowly. Apart from the fact that his arm, now bandaged and supported by a sling, was aching, he had, he supposed, come out of the visit to Querin's residence relatively unscathed.
He took no satisfaction in that, however. He only felt the growing restlessness again. Candles flickered in ornate brass holders on the nearby desk, their feeble light illuminating the heavy, lacquered wood and the shapeless outline of the bulky drapes covering the far wall. On the other side of the room, a pot of incense smouldered, scenting the air with bitter, cloying fumes. Just beyond it was...
No. He wasn't going to think about that now.
A scowl twitched across his features and then was gone. He sighed. He had the distinct impression that events were proceeding without him – not just in the medical centre of the Hole, but beyond it, in the city, in the world, in the very universe itself. It was an uncomfortable feeling. He was an Inquisitor at the end of the day. He was meant to know things. Yet here he sat – in the dark.
He drummed his fingers against the arm of the chair. After a few moments, he became aware that the rhythmic pattern of sound seemed to have grown, become amplified. He stilled his hand. Something continued to rattle rhythmically for a brief instant and then fell quiet. Something from the other side of the room.
Brecht's scowl returned and this time it stayed, the lines of shadow on his face seeming to sharpen.
"Damn," he muttered, as he stood slowly. His injured arm began to throb again, pain pulsing in it in time to the odd rattling he had just heard.
He made his way slowly towards the sound, his steps careful as if the floor of his chamber had been mined in his absence. This part of the study was shadowy, poorly-lit, ornate furniture distinguishable only as vague outlines in the gloom.
Eventually, he reached his destination – a wide, low table with intricately carved legs and feet made to resemble dragon's claws. It had been a gift from the Lady Marina Sun Joy, an exquisitely beautiful noblewoman from Adastra IX who had been ridiculously easy to impress. He stood by the table and reached for the lumen lamp he knew was on it. His fingers found the switch and it winked into life, revealing in its soft, amber light the plain wooden chest that was the source of the rattling.
Almost as if his presence had agitated it once more, the chest trembled and shook. Something was moving inside it, pressing against the lead-lined walls within.
Brecht licked his lips uncertainly. He reached out his free hand tentatively towards the wooden chest. Light reflected dully in the simple metal bands that reinforced the wood. He knew that, were he to touch them, they would be warm beneath his fingers.
He remembered.
The carpet was smouldering beneath his skin and he rolled onto his back, staring up at the gaping hole where most of the ceiling used to be. The sky was a pale, fragile blue – the colour of the vaich'rir songbirds on Welland's Bounty.
His heart ached with an unremembered loss. He realised with a sudden chill that he was wide open, unprotected. All his psychic defences had been stripped away in that one moment of revelation.
Painfully he rolled back onto his stomach and gazed.
Elinore.
Elinore kneeling, her eyes open.
Words wrenched from her mouth. Secrets spilling like vari-coloured jewels from some hidden part of her being.
"Find the boy in darkness.
Heed the Child who cannot speak.
Fear the Black Prince rising.
Dust.
Dust.
All is dust."
Elinore screaming, a horrific wailing, an unwavering articulation of a world of torment and agony and death.
He felt her pain, her anguish, her loss. Staring at her, it was all he could do to keep his sanity.
Elinore. Her mouth wide open, tears streaming down her face, the golden light transforming each one into a diamond of purest brightness.
He had dragged himself across the floor towards her. By the time he had reached her, her screaming had ended and her eyes had closed and the bright, beautiful light had faded, leaving her face a waxy corpse white. Only the almost infinitesimal movement of her chest had signalled that she was still alive.
He glanced down at his hand and at the wooden chest rattling on Lady Sun Joy's table. Heed the Child who cannot speak. Well, that was what he was doing, wasn't it? A powerful sense of unease was growing within him, though. Slowly, he placed his hand on the warm, vibrating metal of the wooden chest's clasp, his fingers fumbling awkwardly with the mechanism.
"My lord?"
"By the Throne!" Brecht whirled round, feeling for a moment like a guilty child.
Vivienne Dranguille was standing in the doorway, the light from the antechamber casting her long shadow into the room.
"I could come back another time." Dranguille's voice was carefully neutral.
Brecht ushered her in with a distracted wave of his hand. He turned away from the box reluctantly, as if leaving a favourite lover.
Dranguille stood before him, hands clasped behind her back. The farther side of her face – the right side – was swathed in medical gauze, held in place by clear tape. A white patch covered her eye. Her other eye was surrounded by red raw skin and gleamed with a fierce intelligence.
Gesturing for her to sit in one of the leather-backed seats near the centre of the room, Brecht recalled the time he had recruited Dranguille. It hadn't been long after Adastra IX and Vivienne had been a young, eager adept, who, even back then, had a frighteningly quick mind. She had also, Brecht remembered, been quite beautiful in a somewhat austere fashion. Well, she would not be beautiful anymore. Brecht felt a sharp twinge of guilt but suppressed it easily enough. She'd known what she was getting into.
"You wanted to see me."
Brecht nodded, his face serious. "I want you to bring in Marchmont."
"As you wish."
"I know you've barely recovered from your ordeal -"
Dranguille's tones were clipped, brooking no argument. "I'm fine."
"Very well." Brecht paused. "Take some support nonetheless. That lad Weil looks like he could use some field experience."
A sly smile crept across the Interrogator's mouth. "Yes, he does, doesn't he?"
Dranguille got up to go, but Brecht's voice stopped her. "I can't help having the feeling that we've been played, Vivienne."
The Interrogator looked at him for a moment, her eye glinting in the half-light. "Then we shall have to play harder, my lord." Her mouth again compressed itself into a hard, unyielding line.
Brecht grinned and dismissed her with a flick of his wrist. "Quite." He watched her close the door behind her. "Go and play, Vivienne," he whispered, his face thoughtful. "Go and play."
He was flying now, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, not with the clumsy desperation of the human vermin, but with the grace and fluid agility of the consummate predator. When the Old Ones had called to him from the depthless malice of the frozen dark, this was what had lured him. For this he had willingly bartered his stultified, civilised, law-embalmed soul.
The woman was frightened.
He had let her see him twice now: the briefest of glimpses – a shape in the very corner of her vision, a shadow on a crumbling wall. Her heart beat quickly in her chest, the sound of blood pulsing in her veins like a siren call to his sensitive ears. She wasn't running yet. No. She wasn't yet quite ready to discard the pathetic cloak of 'civilisation' and reveal the animal she truly was. But she would before the end.
And that would be soon.
For, as much as the thrill of the chase excited him, as much as the scent of her ever-increasing fear coursed through his being like the headiest of drugs, he knew the killing frenzy would soon be upon him – the time when the gift of the Old Ones was strongest. The time when he was at his most powerful. And also his most vulnerable.
Without having to think consciously about it, he leapt a two and a half metre gap between habs, landing gracefully on his powerful legs. He was almost in the throes of the change now. Coarse hair stood out on his forearms and calves; long claws dug into the roof tiles as easily as if they had been made of paper; every sense was straining, acute, eager to drink in every possible aspect of the coming kill. Eager not just to revel in death, but to be overwhelmed by it.
He could see the woman below him, fumbling at a doorway to a Jewellers' Guild boutique, its paint faded and flaking. He could smell the subtle scent of rot from the small patches of exposed wood.
For a long, lingering moment, he gazed on his prey. Short, sandy hair; a thin, sparse frame; plain, cheap clothing, dulled with frequent wear; a single silver bracelet adorning her wrist. Her scent was mingled with cheap perfume, but there was a freshness to it, a naivety. She was young enough still to think of herself as special, favoured by the corpse-god. Life had not yet taught her that all she was was meat.
With a single bound he leapt from the roof, briefly digging his claws into the front of the building to slow his descent, and landed on the pavement with a solid thump. He was about five metres away from her. Easily within striking distance.
Scraps of litter blew down the little street and his hair stirred in the wind. Most of the shopfronts gaped emptily, dilapidated relics of a time when the Cyan Quarter had bustled and buzzed with trade. Now it was quiet, old lampposts gleaming like bleached bones in the morning sunlight.
Varl didn't need to look to know that the woman was the only human in the street. He knew she had heard him. He had counted on it. The change was pushing at the threshold of his consciousness, urgent and seductive, wanting to be let out. He snarled quietly, knowing that she would hear that, too. She stopped fumbling for keys and became perfectly still.
Turn round, he willed, his eyes boring into her tensed back. Turn round and see death.
Very slowly, the woman's head began to move. Jerkily, almost involuntarily, she cast a glance behind her. And stopped, staring.
Varl grinned and took a step forward. The change was gathering like a tidal wave in his blood. Soon there would be nothing but instinct and hunger. But this was the moment he most enjoyed.
The woman's eyes were brown and wide as saucers. She was shaking now, like a tiny rodent, a whimper bound and quivering in the cage of her throat. If she was thinking anything at all it was that this wasn't happening, that it was all a nightmare, a fever dream from which she could awake screaming.
He took another step.
And another.
He was so close he could taste her terror, count the freckles beneath those wide, staring eyes, hear the blood surge desperately in her neck.
Another step.
She was shaking uncontrollably now, seized by a terrible shuddering. The keys jingled in her hands.
And another.
He could reach out a claw and touch her, but he knew that to do so would end things too quickly. If he stroked her, if he felt her skin, he would not be able to control himself. Her fear rolled off her in a stinking miasma, bitter and salty, intoxicating. Wonderful.
He leaned in towards her, let his breath brush against her face like a lover's caress. The change was almost upon him now. He felt the beginning of the terrible pulling in his arms and legs, heard his blood pound impatiently in his ears, sensed the implacable ravenous hunger uncoil like a striking serpent in his aching gut.
His jaw was changing and he knew that in the next few moments he would lose the power of speech, the first symptom of the sickness that was civilisation sloughing off him like old skin. The word he spoke was thick and guttural, awkward and harsh in his stretching, slobbering mouth.
But he leant forward and said it anyway.
"Run."
The medical section had calmed down somewhat and Sister Hospitaller Livia was rather glad about that. Handing a now empty syringe to a passing servitor, she sat down heavily into one of the functional chairs that were arranged against the far wall of the sickbay. Through force of habit, her hand reached into the pocket of her surgical smock, unconsciously searching for a packet of lho-sticks before stopping abruptly.
Sister Livia scowled as she remembered that she had given up smoking just a matter of hours ago. In point of fact, this was the fourth time she had given up smoking this week. Well, she thought, the Emperor rewards slow persistent determination just as much as He does flashy heroics. The thing was she really did want a smoke right now. Her hands lay uselessly in her lap. It seemed to her that they were, in fact, waiting for something to give them purpose, meaning. Something like a long, slender, slowly burning stick of Kavius IV's finest lho.
There were plenty of her sisters back in the mission on Phrysia Primus who would have frowned on her addiction to lho and a fair few who would have scolded her for allowing her body, an instrument of the Emperor's will, to be so defiled. The beauty of working for the Inquisition, however, was that those self-righteous and pompous voices could no longer be heard, although she was willing to concede that her frequent attempts to break her habit were at least in part a response to her memory of them.
Giving an exasperated sigh, Livia let her hands twitch for a moment before settling for using them to smooth back her hair and fiddle somewhat futilely with the leading edge of her fringe.
"Sister?"
She scowled up at a young, serious-looking orderly. What was his name again? Menkelson, wasn't it? Menkelson? Menderson? Menderring? Men –
"Sister?"
"What is it, Men…" She paused, blinking up at him. "I'm sorry," she said, her face breaking into a disarming smile. "I appear to have forgotten your name again. Menderson, wasn't it?"
At least the orderly had the decency to look thoroughly embarrassed. "Erm, it's Torvald, Sister," he mumbled, quietly. "Gaspar Torvald."
Livia blinked again. The everyday sounds of the medical section seemed to fade into the background for a moment. "Right," she said, briskly. "Mister Torvald, what can I help you with?"
Relief broke like a golden dawn over the young man's features only to be replaced quickly by a look of worried concern. "It's the third patient," he said. "I think there's something you should see."