Blood Pact

FIVE Ennisker’s Perishables

Long after the last of the clock towers in the Oligarchy, and away down the hill below in the sprawl of Balopolis, had finished chiming midnight, the men in Ennisker’s Perishables began to die.

The night was as cold and hard as quenched iron, and flurries of snow came and went under the yellow street lighting. Traffic on the New Polis Bridge and the Old Crossing lit up the skeletal girderwork with their headlights, and caught the snowflakes like dust in sunlight. Light rippled across the oil slick river.

Ennisker’s Perishables was a meat-packing plant on the north bank, a large outcrop of ouslite and travertine that dominated the city wall in the shadow of the New Polis Bridge. There was ground access to the place through the warren of streets threading the land-side of the city wall, and water access via pulleys and cage-lifts on the river side.

The plant was grim, and smelled of dank stone. The ooze-breath of the river pushed up into it through its deep basements, and through the vent holes that dotted its stained facade above the waterline like arrow slits in the curtain wall of a donjon. It had been essentially derelict since the war. The Henotic League, a beneficial order founded for the relief of veterans and unhabs, had used it as a hostel for a few years until they had secured larger and less miasmal accommodations up near Arkwround Square. The phantom remnants of a notice announcing this shift of venue, and inviting lost and needy souls to come looking for the ‘hall with the yellow doors’ on Arkwround, still lingered on one of the plant’s paint-scabbed loading doors. A subsequent attempt to revive the plant’s fortunes as a meat-packing site had foundered badly in ’81, but the power, waterlines and heating systems installed at the time had never been disconnected, a fact that Valdyke had noticed with satisfaction while sourcing the venue for his employer.

Nado Valdyke had come recommended by a man who knew a man who knew a man. His reputation was as a fixer, an arranger. A lack of scruples, and a willingness to get on with a job no matter how sound its legality, rounded out his resumé nicely. Though he had enjoyed correspondence with his employer, a series of letters that set out the employer’s requirements in some detail, Valdyke had not met his employer personally.

His employer was from off-world.

When Valdyke received notice that, after a long and arduous voyage, his employer had finally arrived at Balhaut Highstation, Valdyke left his apartment in the Polis stacks and set out to make sure all the arrangements were in place.

He took four men with him, four thugs from the stacks that he’d paid very well to mind him. Valdyke did not intend to leave himself vulnerable to some off-worlder he’d never met.

The employer turned up at Ennisker’s Perishables late, riding in a car leased from the city landing grounds. A few minutes behind the car came two hired tractors, towing cargo trailers that barely fitted down the narrow, riverside streets.

Two of Valdyke’s thugs obediently trundled open the loading doors at the first hint of approaching lights. Valdyke already had the power running in the plant, and had brought in, as instructed, two bulk servitors for lifting work, and a medicae, a man called Arbus, who asked no questions and took what work he could get, due to the small matter of him having been struck off the community registry for malpractice.

The three vehicles drove into the plant’s vast loading dock, a musty cavern lit by sputtering naphtha flares. The bay’s floor had been stained brick-red by decades of blood-letting. At a sign from Valdyke, the thugs rumbled the doors shut.

‘I’m Valdyke,’ said Valdyke, walking up to the man getting out of the leased car. ‘Are you Master Eyl?’

The man brushed off his beige leather coat, and looked Valdyke up and down.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Pleasure to meet you at last,’ said Valdyke. He thought about proffering his hand, but the man didn’t seem like the sort. Not the sort at all.

‘So, you want these shipments unloaded,’ Valdyke began, ‘and th–’

‘Did you receive my instructions?’ Eyl asked him, in an accented voice.

‘Yes, I got them.’

‘Were they clear in all particulars?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Valdyke

‘And the remuneration that I wired across, that was received correctly?’

‘It’s the down payment we agreed,’ Valdyke noted with a nod.

‘Then I’m not entirely sure why any further conversation is required,’ said Baltasar Eyl.

Valdyke hesitated for a second. The man had come in with his attitude set to ‘arsehole’, and Valdyke had diced men for less, for a lot less. Valdyke decided, however, to respond with an agreeable smile and a courteous nod. The smile-and-nod combo was inspired by two things. For one, the balance payment promised for the job was considerable, and Valdyke knew the only way to guarantee getting it was to finish the job properly.

For afters, the man, this off-worlder, had an air about him, something that said he was more than just dangerous. Dangerous was too small a word. He was still and contained, and his gestures were small and restrained, but Valdyke felt that was because an effort of sheer willpower was going on. Eyl’s flesh and behaviour were tightly controlled so that they could hold something in check, the way a straitjacket pinned a man’s arms. They were keeping a tight grip on something that smoked with feral cruelty, something that none of them, not even Eyl, wanted to see get out.

So Valdyke did his smile-and-nod, and clapped his hands. The thugs dragged open the dock’s inner shutters, exposing a second cavern-space, wreathed in steam, and filled with oily black machinery. Arbus the medicae readied his kit, and the servitors plodded forwards, bright orange and pincered like tusker crabs, to unload the containers.

As the work got underway (and Valdyke congratulated himself on his choice of venue, because it was a noisy business of clanks and thumps and piston-whines and vapour-hisses and, anywhere except the half-derelict piles of the riverside, it would have woken the neighbourhood and attracted the attention of the Magistratum), Valdyke assessed his employer a little further. There were three others in Eyl’s party, two men and a woman. The men were whip-cord, dog-eyed men like their master, and Valdyke presumed they were purchased muscle, though they were close with Eyl, their conversations tight and intimate. They were wearing leather bodygloves, boots, gloves and patched, Guard surplus jackets, but then so was every other thug in the sub. The two men had driven the tractors. Eyl had driven the leased car. Given the respect he apparently commanded, it seemed odd that he didn’t have a driver.

The fourth member of his party was a woman, a widow, weeded in a veil and black silks. She’d been riding in the back of Eyl’s motor, as if he was her chauffeur. There was something off about her too. When Valdyke looked at her – and widow or no widow, she was a handsome woman who deserved being looked at – it was as if she kept popping in and out of focus, like a film image distorting slightly as it was exposed to heat. It made Valdyke feel pretty sick to watch, so after a while he stopped.

The servitors detached the containers from the tractor flatbeds, and rolled them back up the dock into the adjoining chamber. Valdyke personally connected them up to the plant’s power source, just as if they were crates of meat, cold-stored, switching their refrigeration supply from mobile to static. Ducting systems inside the containers began to chatter and hum. Display lights lit up on the control panels.

Valdyke checked the lights. It was looking good.

‘Ambient’s coming up, and I’ve got clean green on the vital boost.’

He looked over at Eyl.

‘They look just like shipping pods,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ replied Eyl.

‘But they’re hibernaculums.’

Eyl stared back at him.

‘What?’ asked Valdyke. ‘Come on, I’ve been around. Even if I was so stupid that I couldn’t add together the resources you needed and the medical expertise you wanted on hand, you’re not the first person to smuggle live bodies onto Balhaut inside mortuary boxes.’

‘Am I not?’ asked Eyl lightly. His face, half-lit by the fluttering naphtha flares, was unreadable.

Valdyke shrugged. ‘Deserters, illegal immigrants, people who’d prefer to avoid the light of the Throne, it happens a lot.’ He grinned. ‘Sometimes the poor stiffs inside actually survive the process.’

Valdyke picked up a locking bar and wandered around to the hatch of the first container.

‘Shall we?’ he asked.

Eyl nodded. Valdyke beckoned the medicae over, and then unscrewed the lid of a little pot of commiphora and wiped a smear of the gum resin across his philtrum. The astringent scent filled his nose. Eyl certainly wasn’t the first person to smuggle living contraband onto Balhaut as part of the mortuary trade, and Valdyke had assisted several of his predecessors. The low-berth survival rate was worse than Valdyke had joked. Most of the time, you really didn’t want to smell what was thawing out in the box.

He broke the shipping seal, slid the locking bar into the slot, and rotated it. It took a push and a grunt of exertion, but the teeth of the lock popped, and the main drum of the lock swung away on its hinges. Valdyke pulled it wide, uncoupled the bar, inserted it into the inner socket, and heaved on it again.

The hatch seals released. There was a deep and nasty groan of bad air, an exhalation like the long, lingering and last breath a man ever took, one final lung-emptying exhalation for the ages, after which no more breaths would ever be drawn. Valdyke pulled the hatch open.

‘Oh, Throne,’ the medicae said, coughing, and fanning the air in front of his face.

‘Yeah, that’s ripe,’ said Valdyke, who could smell it despite the commiphora. It was a warm, gorge-raising stink of off-meat, of dirty blood, of gangrene. Stained meltwater ran out over the lip of the hatch and spattered on the dock. It was viscous, and filled, like broth, with lumps of organic matter.

‘Mind your shoes, doc,’ Valdyke said. Arbus muttered a caustic reply, and took a snifter of something medicinal from a hip-flask. Valdyke dropped the locking bar, and pulled out a hooked packing knife, a bent spar of blade forty centimetres long with the edge on the inside of the curve. He chokked the tip in through the polymer sheeting wrapping the pod’s contents, and cut down in a half-sawing, half-slicing motion. The smell got worse. Valdyke could see the first of the packets inside. Glad of his gloves, he reached in and slid it out on its telescoping rail. It came out like a side of meat, wrapped in a polymer shroud, clamped to the suspension rail by heavy-weight metal runners.

The corpse inside the bag was human. The hair had been burned off, and it was uniformly the colour of rare steak, except for the cinder-pits of its eyes and the pearl wince of its teeth. Its arms were crossed over its shrunken breast.

‘Do you think you can save him?’ Valdyke asked.

‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Arbus replied.

Valdyke laughed and clattered out the second packet. This one was even more mutilated. Both corpses had dog-tags threaded around their ankles and secured through the seals of their shrouds.

Valdyke turned and looked at Eyl. Eyl was standing a way back, at the edge of the dock, with the widow and the two men, watching the work.

‘You got dead meat here, sir,’ said Valdyke. ‘Just dead meat. In fact, it looks like a regular shipment of cannon fodder back from the front line.’

‘No,’ said Eyl. ‘Look harder.’

Valdyke frowned, and then a smile spread across his face and became a leer.

‘Did you pack the front end with stiffs?’ he asked, jerking his thumb at the pod. ‘Is that what you did? You packed the front end with genuine stiffs, in case the container got inspected?’

‘No,’ the widow replied suddenly, speaking for the first time. ‘The bodies and blood, they are for the sealing ritual, or the casket won’t be–’

‘Hush, sister,’ said Eyl gently, patting her arm.

‘What did she say?’ asked Valdyke.

‘She said you’re right,’ said Eyl.

‘Sneaky,’ said Valdyke, nodding appreciatively. ‘Very sneaky, my friend.’

‘I’m not your friend,’ said Eyl.

Valdyke brushed that off with a shrug of his shoulders. He had no great desire to be the off-worlder’s pal either. He reached back into the container, and rattled out the third sack of meat.

‘Ah, damn,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Eyl, taking a step closer.

‘This one’s gone too. Sorry, you must have had a pretty serious failure in the hiber systems. Face looks like it’s been gnawed off.’

‘Valdyke?’ Arbus whispered at his side.

‘What?’

‘This one’s alive.’

‘What?’ Valdyke turned and looked down at the body hanging in the stained sack. There was blood pooling in the slack parts of the polymer sheaf, and the poor bastard’s face and shoulders looked like someone had taken a razor blade to them.

‘That’s nonsense,’ Valdyke said.

Arbus shook his head. He was using a receptor wand to scan the body for trace levels.

‘The vitals are low, but they’re what I would associate with coming out of hibernetic suspension.’ He looked at Valdyke, and Valdyke saw something akin to terror lighting the wretched old quack’s eyes.

‘You’re reading it wrong, you old fool,’ Valdyke told him.

‘I’m not, I swear!’ Arbus replied. Then he let out an exclamation of horror, and recoiled from the hanging sack.

‘What?’ Valdyke cried.

‘The eyes! The eyes!’ the medicae stammered.

Valdyke looked back down at the body. Its eyes were open, slots of yellowed irises and small, black pupils staring filmily out of the bloody mask. They were staring right at him.

‘Holy Throne of Terra,’ Valdyke said, and stepped back. ‘What is this?’ he asked. He looked at Eyl. ‘What the hell is this?’

‘It is what it is,’ said Eyl. ‘The scars are ritual marks of allegiance. I don’t expect you to understand.’

Behind him, Valdyke could hear short, muffled gasps of breath, and the wet crackle of polymer sheathing as slippery weight moved around inside it. He heard scrabbling noises and the occasional hiss or thump from inside the pod.

‘I think I’ll be going now,’ Valdyke said.

Eyl shook his head. The widow started to shudder. Valdyke thought for a moment that she had burst into tears behind her veil, but then he realised she was sniggering.

Nado Valdyke yelled for his thugs. No one answered. When he turned to look, all four of his men were lying on the ground. They were lying in curiously slack, unnatural poses. Eyl’s two men were standing over them, hands limp by their sides, staring at Valdyke with their dog-eyes narrowed.

Valdyke spat an oath at them, and one of the men smiled back at him, baring his teeth. The teeth were pink. Blood flowed out over his lip.

Valdyke yelped and turned to run. He slammed into something solid, as solid as a wall. It was Eyl.

Valdyke scrambled at him, but Eyl felt like stone, cold and unrelenting. Eyl shoved him, a light shove that nevertheless felt like the impact of a wrecking ball.

Valdyke staggered backwards, breathlessly sure that some of his ribs had just parted. He felt entirely disorientated. Eyl suddenly had the packing knife that Valdyke had been using.

He put it through Valdyke’s throat, splitting the adam’s apple and driving the blade so deep that the tip poked out through the back of the neck under Valdyke’s hairline. Valdyke hung for a moment like a fish on a hook. His hands clenched and unclenched. His mouth gagged open as if he was gasping for air. Blood welled out over his chin. His eyes were shock-wide as he tried to cope with the massive pain, and tried to deal with the comprehension that he hadn’t just been hurt, he’d suffered a catastrophic injury that had destroyed his life, and which could not be repaired.

Eyl let him fall.

The medicae, Arbus, was cowering and sobbing beside the open container. He looked up as Eyl approached.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘please, are you going to kill me too?’

‘I need you to successfully revive my men,’ said Eyl, frankly.

‘A-and after that?’ Arbus sniffed.

Eyl did not reply.

‘What in the name of Terra are you?’ Arbus wailed.

Eyl looked down at him.

‘We are nothing in the name of Terra,’ he said. ‘We are Blood Pact.’