Absolution Gap

TWELVE

Quaestor Jones had been warned to expect a new guest aboard his caravan. The warning had come straight from the Permanent Way, with the official seals of the Clocktower. Shortly afterwards, a small spacecraft—a single-seat shuttle of Ultra manufacture shaped like a cockleshell—came sliding over the procession of caravan vehicles.

The ruby-hulled vehicle loitered on a spike of expertly balanced thrust, hovering unnervingly while the caravan continued on its way. Then it lowered, depositing itself on the main landing pad. The hull opened and a vacuum-suited figure stepped from the vehicle’s hatch. The figure hesitated, reaching back into the cockpit for a walking stick and a small white case. Cameras tracked him from different viewpoints as he made his way down into the caravan, opening normally impassable doors with Clock-tower keys, shutting them neatly behind him. He walked very slowly, taking his time, giving the quaestor the opportunity to exercise his imagination. Now and then he tapped his cane against some component of the caravan, or paused to run a gloved hand along the top of a wall, inspecting his fingers as if for dust.

“I don’t like this, Peppermint,” the quaestor told the creature perched on his desk. “It’s never good when they send someone out, especially when they only give you an hour’s warning. It means they want to surprise you. It means they think you’re up to something.”

The creature busied itself with the small pile of seeds the quaestor had tipped on to the table. There was something engrossing about just watching it eat and then clean itself. Its faceted black eyes—in the right light they were actually a very dark, lustrous purple—shone like rare minerals.

“Who can it be, who can it be… ” the quaestor said, drumming his fingers on the table. “Here, have some more seeds. A stick. Who do we know who walks with a stick?”

The creature looked up at him, as if on the verge of having an opinion. Then it went back to its nibbling, its tail coiled around a paperweight.

“This isn’t good, Peppermint. I can feel it.”

The quaestor prided himself on running a tight ship, as far as caravans went. He did what the church asked of him, but in every other respect he kept his nose out of cathedral business. His caravan always returned to the Way on time to meet its rendezvous, and he rarely came back without a respectable haul of pilgrims, migrant workers and scuttler artefacts. He took care of his passengers and clients without in any way seeking their friendship or gratitude. He needed neither: he had his responsibilities, and he had Peppermint, and that was all that mattered.

Things had not been as good lately as in the past, but that went for all the caravans, and if they were going to single anyone out for punishment, there were others who had far worse records than the quaestor. Besides, the church must have been largely satisfied with his work for them over the last few years, or else they would not have allowed his caravan to grow so large and to travel such important trade routes. He had a good relationship with the cathedral officials he dealt with, and—though none of them would ever have admitted it—a reputation for fairness when it came to dealing with traders like Crozet. So what was the purpose of this surprise visit?

He hoped it had nothing to do with blood. It was well known that the closer you got to cathedral business, the more likely you were to come into contact with the agents of the Office of Bloodwork, that clerical body which promulgated the literal blood of Quaiche. Bloodwork was an organ of the Clocktower, he knew that. But this far from the Way, Quaiche’s blood ran thin and diluted. It was hard to live in the country, beyond the iron sanctuary of the cathedrals. You needed to think about icefalls and geysers. You needed detachment and clarity of mind, not the chemical piety of an indoctrinal virus. But what if there had been a change of policy, a broadening of the reach of Bloodwork?

“It’s that Crozet,” he said, “always brings bad luck. Shouldn’t have let him aboard this late in the run. Should’ve sent him back with his tail between his legs. He’s a lazy good-for-nothing, that one.”

Peppermint looked up at him. The little mouthparts said, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

“Yes, thank you, Peppermint.” The quaestor opened his desk drawer. “Now why don’t you climb in there until we’ve seen our visitor? And keep your trap shut.”

He reached out for the creature, ready to fold it gently into a form that would fit within the drawer. But the door to his office was already opening, the stranger’s passkey working even here.

The suited figure walked in, stopped and closed the door behind him. He rested the cane against the side of the table and placed the white case on the ground. Then he reached up and unlatched his helmet seal. The helmet was a rococo affair, with bas-relief gargoyles worked around the visor. He slid it over his head and set it down on the end of the table.

Rather to his surprise, the quaestor did not recognise the man. He had been expecting one of the usual church officials he dealt with, but this was truly a stranger.

“Might I have a wee word, Quaestor?” the man asked, gesturing towards the seat on his side of the desk.

“Yes, yes,” Quaestor Jones said hastily. “Please sit down. How was your, um…?”

“My journey from the Way?” The man blinked, as if momentarily narcotised by the utter dullness of the quaestor’s question. “Unremarkable.” Then he looked at the creature that the quaestor had not had time to hide. “Yours, is it?”

“My Pep… my Petnermint. My Peppermint. Pet. Mine.”

“A genetic toy, isn’t it? Let me have a guess: one part stick insect, one part chameleon, one part something mammalian?”

“There’s cat in him,” the quaestor said. “Definitely cat. Isn’t there, Peppermint?” He pushed some of the seeds towards the visitor. “Would you like to, um…?”

Again to the quaestor’s surprise—and he wasn’t quite sure why he had asked in the first place—the stranger took a pinch of the seeds and offered his hand up to Peppermint’s head. He did it very gently. The creature’s mandibles began to eat the seeds, one by one.

“Charming,” the man said, leaving his hand where it was. “I’d get one for myself, but I hear they’re very hard to come by.”

“Devils to keep healthy,” the quaestor said.

“I’m sure they are. Well, to business.”

“Business,” the quaestor said, nodding.

The man had a long, thin face with a very flat nose and a strong jaw. He had a shock of white hair sticking straight up from his brow, stiff as a brush and mathematically planar on top, as if sliced off with a laser. Under the room’s lights it shone with a faint blue aura. He wore a high-collared side-buttoned tunic marked with the Clocktower insignia: that odd, mummylike spacesuit radiating light through cracks in its shell. But there was something about him that made the quaestor doubt that he was a cleric. He didn’t have the smell of someone with Quaiche blood in them. Some high-ranking technical official, then.

“Don’t you want to know my name?” the man asked.

“Not unless you want to tell me.”

“You’re curious, though?”

“I was told to expect a visitor. That’s all I need to know.”

The man smiled. “That’s a very good policy. You can call me Grelier.”

The quaestor inclined his head. There had been a Grelier involved in Hela’s affairs since the very earliest days of the settlement, after the witnessing of the first vanishing. He presumed the Grelier family had continued to play a role in the church ever since, down through the generations. “It’s a pleasure to have you aboard the caravan, Mr. Grelier.”

“I won’t be here long. Just wanted, as I said, a wee word.” He stopped feeding Peppermint, dropping the remaining seeds on the floor. Then he bent down and retrieved the white case, setting it on his lap. Peppermint started cleaning itself, making prayerlike motions. “Has anyone come aboard lately, Quaestor?”

“There are always people coming and going.”

“I mean lately, last few days.”

“Well, there’s Crozet, I suppose.”

The man nodded and flipped open the lid of his case. It was, the quaestor saw, a medical kit. It was full of syringes, racked next to each other like little pointy-headed soldiers. “Tell me about Crozet.”

“One of our regular traders. Makes his living in the Vigrid region, keeps himself to himself. Has a wife named Linxe, and a son, Culver.”

“They’re here now? I saw an icejammer winched against your machine as I came in.”

“That’s his,” the quaestor said.

“Anyone else come in on it?”

“Just the girl.”

The man raised his eyebrows. Like his hair, they were the colour of new snow under moonlight. “Girl? You said he had a son, not a daughter.”

“She was travelling with them. Not a relative, a hitchhiker. Name of…” The quaestor pretended to rack his memory. “Rashmika. Rashmika Els. Sixteen, seventeen standard years.”

“Had your eye on her, did you?”

“She made an impression. She couldn’t help but make an impression.” The quaestor’s hands felt like two balls of eels, sliding slickly against each other. “She had a certainty about her, a determination you don’t see very often, especially not in one her age. She seemed to be on a mission.”

The man reached into the case and took out a clear syringe. “What was her relationship to Crozet? Everything above-board?”

“As far as I know she was just his passenger.”

“You heard about the missing-persons report? A girl running away from her family in the Vigrid badlands? The local constabulary enquiring after a possible saboteur?”

“That was her? I didn’t put two and two together, I’m afraid.”

“Good for you that you didn’t.” He held the syringe up to the light, his face distorted through the glass. “Or you might have sent her back where she came from.”

“That wouldn’t have been good?”

“We’d rather she stayed on the caravan for now. She’s of interest to us, you see. Give me your arm.”

The quaestor rolled up his sleeve and leant across the table. Peppermint eyed him, pausing in its ablutions. The quaestor could not refuse. The command had been issued so calmly that there could be no prospect of disobedience. The syringe was clear: he had come to take blood, not give it.

The quaestor forced himself to remain calm. “Why does she have to stay on the caravan?”

“So she gets to where she has to get to.” Grelier slid the needle in. “Any complaints from your usual acquisitions department, Quaestor?”

“Complaints?”

“About Crozet. About him making a bit more out of his scuttler junk than he normally does.”

“The usual mutterings.”

“This time there might be something in them. The girl sat in on his dealings, didn’t she?”

The quaestor realised that his interrogator knew the answer to almost every question he had come to ask. He watched the syringe as it filled with his blood. “She seemed curious,” he said. “She says she’s interested in scuttler relics. Fancies herself as a bit of a scholar. I didn’t see any harm in letting her sit in. It was Crozet’s decision, not mine.”

“I bet it was. The girl has a talent, Quaestor, a God-given gift: she can detect lies. She reads microexpressions in the human face, the subliminal signals most of us barely notice. They scream at her, like great neon signs.”

“I don’t see…”

He pulled out the syringe. “The girl was reading your acquisitions negotiators, seeing how sincere they were when they said they’d reached their limit. Sending covert signals to Crozet.”

“How do you know?”

“I was expecting her to show up. I listened for the signs. They brought me here, to this caravan.”

“But she’s just a girl.”

“Joan of Arc was just a girl. Look at the bloody mess she left behind.” He put a plaster on the quaestor’s arm, then slid the syringe into a special niche in the side of the case. The blood drained out as the plunger was pushed down by a mechanical piston. The case hummed and chugged to itself.

“If you want to see her…” the quaestor began.

“No, I don’t want to see her. Not yet, at least. What I want is for you to keep her in your sight until you reach the Way. She mustn’t return with Crozet. Your job is to make sure she stays aboard the caravan.”

The quaestor pulled down his sleeve. “I’ll do my best.”

“You’ll do more than your best.” With the case still on his lap he reached over and picked Peppermint up, holding the stiff creature in the fist of one of his vacuum suit gauntlets. With the other hand he took hold of one of Peppermint’s fore-limbs and pulled it off. The creature thrashed wildly, emitting a horrid shrill whistle.

“Oh,” Grelier said. “Now look what I’ve done.”

“No,” the quaestor said, frozen in shock.

Grelier placed the tormented animal back down on the table and flicked the severed arm to the floor. “It’s just a limb. Plenty more where that came from.”

Peppermint’s tail writhed in agonised coils.

“Now let’s talk particulars,” Grelier said. He reached into a pocket of his suit and pulled out a small metal tube. The quaestor flinched, one eye still on his mutilated pet. Grelier nudged the tube across the table. “The girl is a problem,” he said. “She has the potential to be useful to the dean, although he doesn’t know it yet.”

The quaestor tried to hold his voice together. “You actually know the dean?”

“On and off.”

“You’d know if he was alive, I mean?”

“He’s alive. He just doesn’t get out of the Clocktower very often.” Grelier looked at Peppermint again. “Ask a lot of questions for a caravan master, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Open the tube.”

The quaestor did as he was told. Inside, tightly rolled, were two pieces of paper. He pulled them out gently and flattened them on the table. One was a letter. The other contained a series of cryptic markings.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with these.”

“That’s all right, I’ll tell you. The letter, you keep here. The markings, including the tube, you give to a man named Pietr.”

“I don’t know anyone called Pietr.”

“You should. He’s a pilgrim, already aboard your caravan. A wee bit on the unstable side.”

“Unstable?”

Ignoring him, Grelier tapped the case, which was still humming and gurgling to itself as it assayed the quaestor’s blood. “Most of the virus strains in circulation aren’t particularly dangerous. They induce religious feelings or visions, but they don’t directly meddle with the host’s sense of self. What Pietr has is different. We call it DEUS-X. It’s a rare mutation of the original indoctrinal virus that we’ve tried to keep the lid on. It places him at the centre of his own private cosmos. He doesn’t always realise it, but the virus is rewiring his sense of reality such that he becomes his own God. He’ll be drawn to the Way, to one or other of the orthodox churches, but he’ll always feel in conflict With conventional doctrine. He’ll bounce from one sect to another, always feeling himself on the verge of enlightenment. His choices will become more and more extreme, pushing him towards odder and odder manifestations of Haldora worship, like the Observers.”

The quaestor had never heard of DEUS-X, but the religious type Grelier had described was familiar enough to him. They were usually young men, usually very serious and humourless. There was something already in their brains that the virus latched on to. “What does he have to do with the girl?”

“Nothing, yet. I just want him to come into possession of that tube and that piece of paper. It will mean something to him already, although he’ll never have seen the markings written down that precisely. For him it will be like finding illuminated scripture, where before all he had were scratches on stone.”

The quaestor examined the paper again. Now that he looked closer, he thought he had seen the markings before. “The missing vanishing?” he asked. “I thought that was just an old wives’ tale.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s an old wives’ tale or not. It’ll be one of the fringe beliefs with which Pietr has already come into contact. He’ll recognise it and it will spur him to act.” Grelier studied the quaestor very carefully, as if measuring his reliability. “I have arranged for a spy to be present amongst the Observers. He will mention to Pietr something about a girl on a crusade, something already foretold. A girl born in ice, destined to change the world.”

“Rashmika?”

Grelier made a gun shape with his hand, pointed it at the quaestor and made a clicking sound. “All you have to do is bring them together. Allow her to visit the Observers and Pietr will take care of the rest. He won’t be able to resist passing on the knowledge he has gained.”

The quaestor frowned. “She needs to see those markings?”

“She needs a reason to meet the dean. The other letter will help—it concerns her brother—but it may not be enough. She’s interested in the scuttlers, so the missing vanishing will prick her curiosity. She’ll have to follow it to its conclusion, no matter how badly her instincts tell her to stay away from the cathedrals.”

“But why don’t I just give her the tube now? Why the need for this cumbersome charade with the Observers?”

Grelier looked at Peppermint again. “You really don’t learn, do you?”

“I’m sorry, I just…”

“The girl is extraordinarily difficult to manipulate. She can read a lie instantly, unless the liar is completely sincere. She needs to be handled with a buffer of unquestioning, utterly delusional self-belief.” Grelier paused. “Anyway, I need to know her limits. When I have studied her from a distance, she can be approached openly. But until then I want to guide her remotely. You are part of the buffer, but you will also be a test of her ability.”

“And the letter?”

“Give it to her personally. Say it came into your possession through a secret courier and that you know nothing beyond that. Observe her closely, and report on her reaction.”

“And what if she asks too many questions?”

Grelier smiled sympathetically. “Have a bash at lying.”

The medical case chimed, its analysis complete. Grelier swung it around so that the quaestor could see the results. On the inside of the lid, histograms and pie charts had sprung into view.

“All clear?” the quaestor asked.

“Nothing you need worry about,” Grelier replied.

On his private cameras, the quaestor watched the ruby-hulled cockleshell spacecraft lift off from the caravan. It flipped over, its main thrusters throwing wild shadows across the landscape.

“I’m sorry, Peppermint,” he said.

The creature was trying to clean its face, its one remaining forelimb thrashing awkwardly across its mouth-parts like a broken windscreen-wiper. It looked at the quaestor with those blackcurrant eyes, which were not as uncomprehending as he might have wished.

“If I don’t do what he wants, he’ll come back. But whatever he wants with that girl isn’t right. I can feel it. Can you? I didn’t like him at all. I knew he was trouble the moment he landed.”

The quaestor flattened out the letter again. It was brief, written in a clear but childish script. It was from someone called Harbin, to someone called Rashmika.

The flight to the Nostalgia for Infinity only took ten minutes, most of which was spent in the final docking phase, queued up behind the transports that had arrived earlier. There were a number of entry points into the towering ship, open apertures like perfectly rectangular caves in the sides of the spire. The highest was more than two kilometres above the surface of the sea. In space they would have been the docking bays for small service craft, or the major airlocks that permitted access to the ship’s cavernous internal chambers.

Scorpio had never really enjoyed trips to the Infinity, under any circumstances. Frankly, the ship appalled him. It was a perversion, a twisted mutation of what a mechanical thing should be like. He did not have a superstitious bone in his body, but he always felt as if he was stepping into something haunted or possessed. What really troubled him was that he knew this assessment was not entirely inaccurate. The ship was genuinely haunted, in the sense that its whole structural fabric had been inseparably fused with the residual psyche of its erstwhile Captain. In a time when the Melding Plague had lost some of its horror, the fate of the Captain was a shocking reminder of the atrocities it had been capable of.

The shuttle dropped off its passengers in the topmost docking bay, then immediately returned to the sky on some other urgent colonial errand. A Security Arm guard was already waiting to escort them down to the meeting room. He touched a communications earpiece with one finger, frowning slightly as he listened to a distant voice, then he turned to Scorpio. “Room is secured, sir.”

“Any apparitions?”

“Nothing reported above level four hundred in the last three weeks. Plenty of activity in the lower levels, but we should have the high ship to ourselves.” The guard turned to Vasko. “If you’d care to follow me.”

Vasko looked at Scorpio. “Are you coming down, sir?”

“I’ll follow in a moment. You go ahead and introduce yourself. Say only that you are Vasko Malinin, an SA operative, and that you participated in the mission to recover Clavain—and then don’t say another word until I get there.”

“Yes, sir.” Vasko hesitated. “Sir, one other thing?”

“What?”

“What did he mean about apparitions?”

“You don’t need to know,”

Scorpio said. Scorpio watched them troop off into the bowels of the ship, waiting until their footsteps had died away and he was certain that he had the landing bay to himself. Then he made his way to the edge of the bay’s entrance, standing with the tips of his blunt, childlike shoes perilously close to the edge.

The wind scrubbed hard against his face, although today it was not especially strong. He always felt in danger of being blown out, but experience had taught him that the wind usually blew into the chamber. All the same, he remained ready to grab the left-hand edge of the door for support should an eddy threaten to tip him over the lip. Blinking against the wind, his eyes watering, he watched the claw-shaped aircraft bank and recede. Then he looked down, surveying the colony that, despite Clavain’s return, was still very much his responsibility.

Kilometres away, First Camp sparkled in the curve of the bay. It was too distant to make out any detail save for the largest structures, such as the High Conch. Even those build-ings were flattened into near-insignificance by Scorpio’s elevation. The happy, bustling squalor and grime of the shanty streets were invisible. Everything appeared eerily neat and ordered, like something laid out according to strict civic rules. It could have been almost any city, on any world, at any point in history. There were even thin quills of smoke rising up from kitchens and factories. Yet other than the smoke there was nothing obviously moving, nothing that he could point to. But at the same time the entire settlement trembled with a frenzy of subliminal motion, as if seen through a heat haze.

For a long time, Scorpio had thought that he would never adjust to life beyond Chasm City. He had revelled in the constant roaring intricacy of that place. He had loved the dangers almost as much as the challenges and opportunities. On any given day he had known that there might be six or seven serious attempts on his life, orchestrated by as many rival groups. There would be another dozen or so that were too inept to be worth bringing to his attention. And on any given day Scorpio might himself give the order to have one of his enemies put to sleep. It was never business with Scorpio, always personal.

The stress of dealing with life as a major criminal element in Chasm City might have appeared crippling. Many did crack—they either burned out and retreated back to the limited spheres of petty crime that had bred them, or they made the kind of mistake it wasn’t possible to learn from.

But Scorpio had never cracked, and if he had ever screwed up it was one time only—and even then it had not exactly been his fault. It had been wartime by then, after all. The rules were changing so fast that now and then Scorpio had even found himself acting legally. Now that had been frightening.

But the one mistake he had made had been nearly terminal. Getting caught by the zombies, and then the spiders… and because of that he had fallen under Clavain’s influence. And at the end of it a question remained: if the city had defined him so totally, what did it mean to him no longer to have the city?

It had taken him a while to find out—in a way, he had only really found the answer when Clavain had left and the colony was entirely in Scorpio’s control.

He had simply woken up one morning and the longing for Chasm City was gone. His ambition no longer focused on anything as absurdly self-centred as personal wealth, or power, or status. Once, he had worshipped weapons and violence. He still had to keep a lid on his anger, but he struggled to remember the last time he had held a gun or a knife. Instead of feuds and scores, scams and hits, the things that crammed his days now were quotas, budgets, supply lines, the bewildering mire of interpersonal politics. First Camp was a smaller city—barely a city at all, really—but the complexity of running it and the wider colony was more than enough to keep him occupied. He would never have believed it back in his Chasm City days, but here he was, standing like a king surveying his empire. It had been a long journey, fraught with reversals and setbacks, but somewhere along the way—perhaps that first morning when he awoke without longing for his old turf—he had become something like a statesman. For someone who had started life as an indentured slave, without even the dignity of a name, it was hardly the most predictable of outcomes.

But now he worried that it was all about to slip away. He had always known that their stay on this world was only ever intended to be temporary, a port of call where this particular band of refugees would wait until Remontoire and the others were able to regroup. But as time went on, and the twenty-year mark had approached and then passed without incident, the seductive idea had formed in his mind that perhaps things might be more permanent. That perhaps Remontoire had been more than delayed. That perhaps the wider conflict between humanity and the Inhibitors was going to leave the settlement alone.

It had never been a realistic hope, and now he sensed that he was paying the price for such thinking. Remontoire had not merely arrived, but had brought the arena of battle with him. If Khouri’s account of things was accurate, then the situation truly was grave.

The distant town glimmered. It looked hopelessly transient, like a patina of dust on the landscape. Scorpio felt a sudden visceral sense that someone dear to him was in mortal danger.

He turned abruptly from the open door of the landing deck and made his way to the meeting room.