The Unquiet Grave Read online

  She threw the pod at Red.

  "Crap!" Red dived aside, heard the pod skitter past her and fetch up in the pile of soil from the smashed plant. It was bleeping. She covered her head.

  Nothing happened. Eventually she looked up, from under her crossed arms.

  Ketta was gone.

  Red went over to the urn, warily. The pod was still there, bleeping plaintively. A small circular screen on one face was showing a blinking green dot. "Sneck. A tracker."

  She pocketed the pod and walked back over to Harrow, feeling more than a little foolish. "Don't look at me like that, Jude. It might have been a grenade."

  "Mwrr," he replied. His eyes were following her, now.

  "Somebody got you pretty good, didn't they?" She got him up into a sitting position, and wiped the foam from his lips. "Come on, Jude. We can't stay here. They'll want us to sweep up."

  It took some effort getting Harrow back to his room without being seen, but Red managed it. Just.

  By the time she laid him down on the narrow bed he was starting to get some voluntary movement back and trying to speak. "Bubburr," he kept saying.

  She smiled down at him. "Jude, you know I've not got a clue what you're saying. Put a sock in it until I get back, okay?"

  "Ba. Burrbr."

  "I've got to do this. You heard what she said. Maybe it's him and maybe it isn't, but I've got to know."

  She went to the door, taking Harrow's breath-mask and thermocowl from a hook, and ignored his incomprehensible mutterings. The door could be locked from either side, with a mechanical device so primitive it had taken her some time to work out how it was used. She turned back to Harrow and held the key up.

  "I'll lock you in, okay? That way you'll be safe until I get back. In the meantime, just chill out and practise those buburs."

  Out in the corridor, she checked Ketta's tracker over. It was a flattened egg of black metal, not much bigger than the palm of her hand. There were a few control studs ranged along one side, but she didn't want to touch those and risk losing the signal. Instead she cradled it carefully, turning around to see how the dot moved.

  It was pointing roughly northeast with a distance marker that Red took to show about five kilometres. Not far, she thought. She could get there on foot, if she had to.

  There was still some time until Compline would take place, so there was a risk of being seen in the monastery if she hung around. She had to remind herself that the case against the place still wasn't proved - all she had were some odd feelings and the words of a crazy little Iconoclast who was sworn to kill her. But the more she thought about it - about the refectory with its massive doors and scratched tables, the oddly-familiar Arch, the over-friendly abbot and his tea - the more she wanted to leave the weird moon.

  The best way to go, she decided, was outside.

  There were heat-locks in several positions around the courtyard, the closest of which lay just to the east of the main gate. Red found it without too much trouble, only having to hide once or twice, and put the thermocowl and breath-mask on. Once the integral heaters were up to speed, she keyed the heatlock and went through.

  Moments later, she was in the courtyard.

  The gravity was light out here, and the thin air stunningly cold. Red had forgotten what it would be like outside, and wondered for a moment whether she should go back and find another way to track down the signal.

  "Sneck, girl," she hissed to herself. "It's just a bit of weather!"

  Once outside the gates she hugged the side of the monastery as long as she could; partly to avoid being seen, partly for shelter. It was only when she reached the north-eastern corner that she realised the route she would have to take.

  The tracker was guiding her along the rim of the Eye of God.

  Red cursed to herself. The Eye of God was as breathtaking as it was unnerving, a crater so vast it reached to the horizon and beyond. It was impossible to see it as a shape, it was just a hazy wall in the distance, and a cliff dropping away from the front of the monastery, so deep that light never reached the bottom.

  She began trudging along. The wind, fast and icy cold as it was, didn't have much force behind it. There wasn't enough density in the air. It didn't slow her, but every now and then its gentle pushes made her realise how close she was to the sheer drop dozens of kilometres deep.

  "It's a plot," she snarled into the mask. "That little bitch is trying to get me to trip and fall off the edge, let this place do her dirty work for her."

  The rim of the Eye wasn't level or smooth, despite how it looked from the air. The edge of the crater was ragged, torn. Great shards of glassy rock still speared up from it like broken teeth, the remnants of the titan blister that had once stood here, and in other places the ground was shattered and scoured into great gullies. There were rock fragments and frost everywhere.

  Hard going.

  After a while, Red noticed that the width of ground she had to walk on was becoming steadily less. The double crater Rinaud had called the Hourglass almost touched the Eye at a point ahead of her, and the flat space between them was being drawn into a point. Red wondered if she would reach the source of the tracker signal before she ran out of ground.

  She remembered Rinaud's story about the monk who fell into the Hourglass. Had he been making this same journey? He was probably down there, freeze-dried, his screaming face frozen forever, looking up at her right now.

  Red swore and shook the thought away. The trip was tough enough without trying to scare herself silly.

  Just before she reached the point where the Hourglass touched the Eye of God, the tracker started to whine. Red took it out of her cowl and saw that the green dot was almost at the centre of the screen. The distance marker was down to a few metres.

  She glanced about. Just bare, gleaming rock, frost, terrifying drops. No sign of a corpse, Iconoclast or otherwise.

  "Great. Snecking great. What the hell am I looking for?"

  She moved forward and risked a glance back towards the monastery. It was mostly concealed by upright shards and boulders, but what she could see of it looked very small indeed.

  "Fine place to hide a body, if there is one. What kind of dipstick would come out here?" She shivered. "Except me. Christ, what am I doing?"

  There was nothing here. It was some kind of trick, to get Red away from the monastery. Maybe Ketta had some other target.

  Maybe she was after Godolkin, and wanted to throw Red off the scent.

  It was time to go back. She turned, began to make her way back along the rim, and as she did so she noticed something to her right. One of the great gullies, the one she had most recently had to climb into and back out of again, had been modified. She hadn't spotted it on the way out - she'd been facing the wrong way. But the wider end of the gully, where it met the Eye, had laser cuts on the western face.

  Red scrambled back down into the gully, at the shallow end, then began to walk towards the Eye. As she got close to the edge, she saw that there was a step there, leading down.

  She peered over the edge. "Bollocks," she whispered.

  The drop soared away from her. Red had never seen anything so impossibly far down and not be empty space. The crater was hemispherical, she knew, but from her scale it was just a sheer cliff, straight down forever. There wasn't a hint of curve.

  But set into the wall, for about ten metres, was a set of steps. They were narrow, barely wide enough to walk down even if you weren't wearing a thermocowl that reached down to the ankles, and rimmed with frost. The prospect of setting foot on them was awful.

  But someone had. There were depressions in the frost, bootprints. Small ones.

  Ketta?

  Red took a deep breath, and lowered herself onto the first step. She wished she had taken Harrow's advice and worn sensible shoes.

  She went down, a stair at a time, hugging the wall.

  By the time she got to the bottom, her heart was hammering worse than it had during the fight with Ketta. If there was
nothing at the bottom, she decided, and she had to go back up, she'd have to do it backwards. No way she was going to risk turning around on the bottom step, with the thermocowl dragging her about.

  There was an opening at the bottom of the stairs, a round tunnel leading into the stone of the Eye's rim.

  Red ducked in. The tunnel sloped downward, shallowly, and Ketta's bootprints were here, too. The tracker, when she took it out to look at it again, was whining and blinking wildly.

  It was very dark; Red took an emergency flashlight from the cowl, and shone the beam around. From what she could see, the tunnel went for about a hundred metres before ending in complete blackness.

  Not for the first time, she wished she hadn't left all her blasters on the Crimson Hunter.

  She scrambled along the tunnel. It wasn't high, and she had to stoop. The edges of the thermocowl kept catching on the walls.

  Partway along, she almost slipped on something on the tunnel floor, something frozen onto the rock. She shone the flashlight at it, scraped some frost away with the toe of her boot.

  It looked an awful lot like vomit.

  Red suddenly felt very alone. She had seen things no one should see in a thousand lifetimes: she'd been shot, stabbed, beaten up, kidnapped, drugged, bled and worse. She had drunk the blood of hundreds, had hunted men down for money, and killed more times than she could count. But here, in this freezing, glassy tunnel, staring at a patch of frozen sick, she was afraid.

  "No gun," she said quietly. "Note to self: never, ever go anywhere without a gun."

  The tunnel opened out not long after that. Red stood at the edge and stared. No wonder she had seen nothing but blackness at the end of it.

  There was a cavern ahead of her. It was immense.

  The whole monastery could have been housed in that vast space. It was wider than it was high, smooth-sided where the beam of her flashlight fell, made of the midnight glass-stone of Lavannos. A bubble, trapped under the surface, she realised.

  The tracker was emitting a solid, thrumming whine. She took it out and pressed the control studs until it went silent.

  Red scrambled down onto the floor of the cavern. There was a lot of frost build-up: her boots went in it up to the ankles. Which was how she managed to trip over the corpse before she saw it.

  She managed not to drop the flashlight, but her collision with the body had her legs from under her. Red lost her footing and tumbled, rolling onto her back. "Shit!"

  It took a moment or two to get upright again. The thermocowl was so large - it practically ungulfed her - so heavily padded that it was like walking around under a cupboard. She fought her way upright, feeling like an idiot, then turned the flashlight on the corpse.

  It was a man, naked to the waist, sprawled out under the frost. He was frozen solid, eyes open, mouth full of snow. His face and shoulders were daubed with glittering, crystallised blood.

  It wasn't Godolkin.

  Red looked closer. "Sneck," she muttered. "How did he get out here?"

  There was something strange about the man's head. Red reached down, grabbed the body's frozen arm and hauled it out of the frost.

  And came face to face with the inside of its open skull.

  She gave a yelp of horror and leaped back, letting the corpse topple back. The man's head had been cut completely open on a line just above the eyebrows. The top of his head was missing, and the contents scooped out; there was nothing left inside but frozen scraps of vein and tissue. Red had seen right down to the base of his brainpan.

  "Goddamn!" No wonder there was a pile of vomit in the tunnel. Red might have lost her own lunch, if she'd had any. She took another step back.

  Something crunched under her boot. She looked down and saw frozen fingers skittering away. "Aw, crap," she moaned.

  There was another body behind her. A woman this time, perhaps in her mid-forties. No visible injuries, save the shattered hand and the fact that her skull was opened and emptied in the same way as before. Gazing blankly through a mask of blood.

  Red swallowed hard and scanned the flashlight beam across the floor.

  There was another carcass. And another. Two more.

  Several, lying in a heap, skulls full of frost.

  The edge of a great pile of corpses spreading from halfway along the floor of the cavern to its distant edge - rising up metre after metre - a tangle of arms and legs and slack faces and severed skulls. A mountain of corpses, freeze-dried, denied the dignity of decay and rot. Stacked like logs. The ones she had seen first were just the few that had rolled off the pile.

  Red could barely take it in. There were thousands of them. It was a charnel pit, a nightmare.

  Every corpse had been skulled, the brain removed.

  "Godolkin," she whispered. "Don't tell me you're here too."

  "Is that who you're looking for? That heretic?"

  She snapped the flashlight beam up. Major Ketta was crouching in the shadows, to the side of the cavern, hidden under the folds of a black thermocowl.

  Red hadn't heard her in the thin air, hadn't been able to smell her through her breath-mask. "Is he here?"

  Ketta shrugged. She seemed sullen, beaten, as though the horror of this place had stripped all the fight from her. "I've not seen him."

  "You said an Iconoclast was here." At that, Ketta pointed to one of the corpses, a few metres behind Red.

  She turned the flashlight on it. The man was on his side, eyes staring blindly into the cavern, his skull gaping. He was quite small and slender, his skin dark. A little jet-black hair still remained around the edges of his opened cranium. "One of yours?"

  "Major Gaius. My predecessor."

  Not Godolkin. There was still a chance, then... Red grimaced, looking closer at the Iconoclast agent. Something inside his skull was flashing, a tiny light in the bone of his head.

  A tracer-implant. Red suddenly felt sick. She snatched the tracker out of her cowl and flung it away. "Sneck, what the hell is going on here? Did your people do this?"

  "Hardly Iconoclast style, Blasphemy." Ketta straightened. "We don't hide our actions away in the darkness. That's a mutant thing to do."

  "Not this mutant." Red gnawed her lip for a moment.

  Where had all the bodies come from?

  Red turned the flashlight beam on the corpse-pile again. She couldn't believe they had been carried all the way down those treacherous steps, not when it would have been far easier just to toss them into the Eye of God.

  The circle of light climbed the mound of bodies, and above.

  There was an opening in the stone, the lower edge fanged with crimson icicles. "There," she muttered, mostly to herself. "They come from up there."

  She started forwards, and began climbing over the frozen bodies.

  The Iconoclast was staring at her. "What in the name of the Holy Patriarch do you think you're doing?"

  Red glanced around at her. "I'm going to find my friend," she said simply. "You can come along if you like."

  Ketta glared at her, not moving.

  "Suit yourself," Red muttered. And kept on climbing.

  8. THE WHEEL

  Climbing up to the opening was probably the most ghastly thing Durham Red had ever done.

  The bodies she clambered over were frozen hard, their limbs like brittle wood. She could hear flesh cracking away from bone whenever she put a foot down, could feel the soft crunch of desiccated tissues through her gloves. Some of the carcasses that had been thrown down from the opening were connected to each other; joined as one by slivers of blood that had frozen together. Others were loose, alone, moving treacherously under her as she scrambled over them.

  Partway up she knew she'd never make it with the thermocowl on. Its weight was too much, even in the light gravity, and she couldn't get her legs free of it properly. Eventually she gave up on the thing.

  She found a relatively stable place to perch for a few seconds, and stripped the seal. The cowl's heating fans whirred to a halt, and freezing Lavannos
air rushed in through the opening: Red gasped, feeling the cold hit her like a punch to the senses, squeezing the breath from her lungs.

  The cowl came off in one fluid movement. She flung it away from her, down to the floor. It landed next to Ketta. "If you can't do anything more useful, kiddo, look after that for me. I'll be back for it later."

  The Iconoclast didn't reply. Red shrugged, and began to climb again. It was easier without the cowl and the exertion soon warmed her. A human would have frozen to death in minutes, she knew, but Durham Red was much more than human in a lot of ways.

  The last few metres were almost flat; she had reached the top of the pile. She scampered up, wincing as her fingers found purchase on the lip of an open skull, and pulled herself upright. The opening, a round tunnel big enough to drive Rinaud's rover though, gaped in front of her, its lower edge a razored mass of overlapping icicles.

  All the hanging ice gleamed in dark crimson.

  Red shone the flashlight up the tunnel. "Steep slope," she reported, calling down to Ketta. "Looks like a drain: they just slide the poor bastards down it."

  "Shout louder, monster. If the killers are here they might not be able to hear you."

  The Iconoclast's voice hadn't come from the bottom of the pile of human corpses. Red glanced around, and swore under her breath. Ketta had discarded her own cowl, and was scaling effortlessly up the pile of corpses.

  Within moments she was standing upright at the top.

  Red turned to face her. "If you were going to take another pop, you'd have done it down there."

  "Don't count on it."

  "So?"

  "I'm sworn to destroy you, monster. Make no mistake about that. But my primary orders are to find and take - alive if possible - the killer of Major Gaius." Ketta nodded towards the opening. "Amazingly, that seems not to be you."

  The Iconoclast was very close to Red now. If she lashed out without warning she could slam the girl right off the pile, be on her before she hit the floor. There was a good chance she could have Ketta's throat out before she could react.

  But...

  If Godolkin was alive, he would need help. If he wasn't, his killers would find out what it felt like to be ripped open. In either case, an extra pair of fists would be no bad thing.