The Encoded Heart Read online

  "Static charge," gasped Ketta. "Come on, for God's sake! It's almost on us!"

  There was a rising hum, a shivering. Harrow could feel the hairs on his forearms shift, drawn up by the electricity in the air. When he took a step towards the trees, his boots crackled as they met the ground.

  "Run, you bloody idiot!" Ketta yelled, and darted past him. Harrow needed no further encouragement, and began his own flight towards the treeline. He was halfway there when he heard Godolkin snarl behind him, followed by an odd scuffling sound. The sound of a blow, metal on flesh.

  Harrow glanced over his shoulder. A second later he had stopped dead, skidding to a halt and dropping to one knee with the carbine jammed back into his shoulder, waiting for the chance to fire.

  Hermas was still alive. The Omega was on his feet, and had Godolkin around the throat.

  The warrior still had the staking pin through his chest, from his back to his sternum, but it didn't seem to be slowing him down. His hands were locked around Godolkin's neck, despite the pounding he was receiving.

  Harrow saw Godolkin drop the holy weapon, free his right arm, and send Hermas sprawling with a punch to the head. The Omega warrior was just leaping back into the fray when the towers came alive.

  One of the structures was close to where Harrow knelt, close enough for him see a network of fine lines spring to life. The lines were made of light; a complex, regular network of sapphire brilliance that covered the tower from base to point for an instant before they widened, spilling blue light and shadow across the clearing.

  The towers were springing apart, the multiple sections that formed their outer casing moving smoothly outwards on hidden pistons, allowing the light that filled them to escape. Past that painful glare, Harrow caught a glimpse of the machinery inside the spires, but the devices were too bright to behold for long. He had to shield his eyes from them.

  The light had appeared rapidly. Hermas and Godolkin were caught by it like moths in a torch-beam - it was over them before they had a chance to move. They were still transfixed when the towers played their final trick.

  The tower closest to Harrow snapped out a thread of searing blue light, bright as a laser, that connected its peak to that of the tower opposite. A moment later the other towers did the same, and the point at which the two beams crossed began to spit sparks. Harrow saw, for a split second, those sparks rain down on Matteus Godolkin's upturned face.

  In the next instant the beams intersected at a point of light at the clearing's centre, a point that seemed to flower into an autonomous shape. It was a cube, growing as Harrow stared at it, its edges perfectly regular, its faces a maddening twist of refraction. The cube twisted as it grew, all six of its faces giving birth to another cube, each reflecting and distorting the image of the first.

  Those cubes vomited forth others, in their turn, and those children did the same. The process accelerated violently, doubling in speed with each incarnation, until the shape between the towers was an eruption, a foam of glassy light and billowing edges.

  Before Harrow could shout, it had swallowed the men beneath it. He saw a fleeting image, so quick and so small it could only have been his imagination, of Godolkin's face reflected a million times across the faces of those seething cubes, before it was replaced by fire.

  First an image of fire, and then the real thing. Harrow heard running feet behind him, felt something strike him with impossible strength and flatten him into the dirt, just as the cubes and the towers vanished in a firestorm that blotted out the world.

  14. CONVERSATIONS UNDERGROUND

  There came a point during the journey to Ashkelon when Matteus Godolkin beheld wonders.

  It was a very brief point indeed. Much of the trip - for he now knew that he had been transported - consisted of being thrown wildly about in myriad directions all at once. It hadn't felt like movement, exactly, but something altogether more distressing. As though he was shifting through different states of being.

  The journey had begun with the Omega's hands around his throat, but as soon as the towers had begun their display he had lost sight of the warrior completely. One moment Hermas was next to him, gazing up in horrified rapture at the rain of sparks, and the next he was gone. Godolkin was in darkness, and falling, as though he had tumbled down a mineshaft.

  That had led in turn to the directionless buffeting, the mad shaking from one state of existence to the next, all in complete blackness. Wherever Godolkin spent those first wild moments, it was a place where light did not exist. His eyes were open, but so was his mouth, and he saw about as much through each.

  But then came the wonders.

  They burst on him quite suddenly, only for a split second. What he saw had nothing to do with vision; his eyes were still dead to him. The wonders came upon him like a flood, over and through him. They made their impressions on his mind because, for that infinitesimal fraction of time, he was a part of them.

  Worlds, he saw, countless worlds. Worlds that he knew, countless others he had never heard of. And each place he saw was an infinity, superimposed upon themselves and one another in an insane panoply of possibilities.

  Had it lasted any longer than they did, Godolkin's mind would have come apart at the seams, of that he was certain. As it was, the darkness came back to claim him as soon as it had left, followed swiftly by a feeling of deceleration. And with it came another sensation, equally puzzling: that of reduction. Godolkin felt that he was being simplified, translated, reduced, until all that he was had become nothing more than a symbol of itself.

  At the moment at which his essence was reduced to its most basic level, the light returned, leaving him to drop several metres through the air onto his head.

  He awoke some time later with a pounding headache and images of a billion worlds dancing behind his eyes.

  The worlds faded, mercifully, as did the pain. Soon he was able to lift his head enough to see where he was.

  The sight did nothing for his mood.

  He was in a dungeon. There was no prettifying the description: he was in a windowless space, cylindrical, defiantly subterranean. The walls were lined with glossy white tiles, the floor and the ceiling too, although it strained his neck to look high enough to see it. The dungeon was scrubbed clean, reeking of disinfectant, but Godolkin knew this had less to do with hygiene than with sensory deprivation. A bloodstain or two would give the eye a point of focus in all this gleaming white.

  There were a couple of imperfections: the door, a heavy slab of dark metal; a drain in the centre of the floor, and, chained on the opposite side of the dungeon was the Omega warrior Hermas.

  Godolkin let his head drop forward again. He, like Hermas, was chained to the wall.

  "You're awake, then," the Omega said, without much malice. "You've a thick skull, heretic. When you came down head-first I thought that was the end of you."

  Godolkin said nothing. A part of him wished the fall had cracked his skull, had laid his brains on the floor. His desire for self-preservation was, at least in part, diminished.

  Hermas, however, wasn't about to content himself with silence. "Won't you speak, heretic?"

  "I'd rather not."

  "And here I was thinking we'd finally get to know each other."

  Godolkin looked up at him. The man was dangling from his chains, unable to properly stand upright in their clasp but looking far more comfortable than he had any right to - given the staking pin sticking out of his chest. "I believe, commander, that I know everything about you that I need to."

  Hermas sneered. "You know less than you think, heretic. About many things."

  "Heretic?" Godolkin raised an eyebrow. "And what should I call you? Hermas? You're no Iconoclast. You are not even human. There are mutants languishing in the most loathsome dungeons of the Inquisitorium that have more humanity in them than you."

  "Like that weasel Harrow? I'm sure you and he had a pleasant little camping trip. What did you bring him for? Entertainment? Some boyish warmth in the n
ight?"

  Godolkin let his head drop again. The chains made it hard to keep his gaze level for long, and his neck muscles ached powerfully from the fall. "A pack animal," he replied. "But your comments please me, Hermas. Now I know that Saulus was truly insane, to have chosen the likes of you as the basis for his warrior race."

  There was a long silence. Then Hermas said, very calmly, "If I get the chance, heretic, I'll have your tongue for that."

  A sore point, then. Godolkin stored it away. "Forgive me, Hermas. I thought that you were built to bring down the Blasphemy, nothing more. I didn't realise that your conditioning was liable to break down so quickly."

  "If you think you can enrage me with such petty sarcasm, Godolkin, you're a duller blade than I thought." Hermas had regained his conversational tone. "And for your information, we were never conditioned. Our hatred of the bitch-saint is as it always was. But we're fewer than we were destined to be."

  "And getting fewer all the time."

  "Ketta picks off one of us here, another there. Her private crusade, in between grubbing for work like a backstreet assassin." The Omega's voice lowered. "I'll tell you this, Godolkin. Just as we broke the secret of the shadow web, so we'll soon crack the code of our own creation. Saulus left it there for us, locked inside. All we have to do is turn the key just so, and we'll swarm over Ketta, and your precious saint, like flies on shit."

  Apt, thought Godolkin. "So are you the leader of your people?"

  "I was the first. If that makes me leader, then so be it."

  "It probably just makes you older."

  "And Ketta thinks me a wordy braggart." Hermas laughed, the sound deep and resonant within the tiled cell. "I knew it, Godolkin. You are me, in all but name."

  Godolkin's head snapped up. "And now the delusions."

  "You can deny it all you like, Godolkin, but the truth remains: you and I are mirror images. Both elitists. Both Iconoclasts once, but no longer. Both outcast by the actions of the bitch-saint Durham Red."

  That stung. Godolkin forced his tone level. "Really," he replied. "I assumed you'd reserve more bile for Major Ketta. Wasn't it she who brought Saulus to justice?"

  "Justice?" The Omega turned his head and spat. The spittle hissed as it struck the floor. "That word has no meaning to me, heretic! Lord-Tactician Saulus was a genius, a father to me and my kin! When Ketta brought him low, she took humanity with her."

  "Hermas and his Omega warriors, the last best hope of humankind. Your arrogance is even more astounding than your stupidity."

  "And who else will stand against the mutant? You and your line-troops? So crazed with superstition you'll follow your worst enemy on hands and knees after one nip. I've felt the bite of your Scarlet Saint, Godolkin." He turned his head, displaying a pair of ragged scars running from below his ear to just above his shoulder. "Just like you. But unlike you, I'm not so mindless a drone that I believe she has power over me. On the contrary, I'm sure I felt better than she did after the encounter."

  "That was your blood on the bridge."

  "Some of it was mine."

  "Hmph," snorted Godolkin. "Your blood and her vomit. It seems she found you almost as hard to stomach as I do."

  The Omega's eyes narrowed. "Your wit will be the death of you, Godolkin. If I have anything to do with it."

  "You won't."

  It was a third voice, coming from the doorway. The armoured slab had swung aside on silent hinges. Light spilled through, past the figure of a man.

  At first glance, his appearance was nothing that would raise comment. Of middling height, quite slender; his hair cut short, his coat long. But Godolkin, who was trained to notice such things, looked past the man's pleasant expression and unimpressive physique. The coat had a waterproof sheen to it, as though it might need frequent cleaning. There were marks on his face from wearing protective goggles, and the way his fingers crooked unconsciously made them seem to be clasping a knife.

  A torturer, then. Godolkin, chained in a dungeon, should have expected nothing less.

  "I'm afraid," the man said quietly, "that we're on rather a tight schedule today. Normally I'd leave you here for a week, maybe two, just so you could get to know each other. But my hand is forced. I'll need to work a little more swiftly than I'm used to."

  He looked slowly from one prisoner to the other. "You'll forgive me, then, if my methods are more direct than usual. Time is of the essence."

  "Good," growled Hermas. "I've spent enough moments in this fool's company."

  The torturer smiled at him. "So eager," he whispered. "What a choice! So who will I take first?"

  It was another blurred journey. Godolkin was drugged and hooded for his trip to the torturer's lair. His system started to work on the drug immediately it was injected, but the chemical, coupled with the darkness of the hood, still set his head spinning. By the time it stopped, he was in a different place.

  He was lying down on some kind of trolley, cold steel at his back, thick canvas straps securing his chest, wrists and ankles. Even inside the hood, he could perceive different smells: more disinfectant, but also blood, metal, thin oil. Human excrement.

  He lay still, listening. The torturer's footsteps went past him, unhurried, but there were at least two others close by. Assistants, he decided. Godolkin wondered if the set-up could get any more theatrical or clichéd.

  Another needle slipped into his arm and he groaned.

  There was a creaking sound. The torturer had sat down beside him. "How do you feel?" the man asked.

  Godolkin held his tongue. This new drug was unleashing a flood of emotions in him - fear, mainly, but tinged with undertones of loneliness, bass notes of lust. His heart hammered behind his ribs, then slowed. Nausea washed over him, and sweat prickled his skin.

  The drugs were powerful, their effect complex. In anyone but an elite Iconoclast shocktrooper, they would have been hideously effective. But Godolkin's modified system metabolised them within moments, flushing the residue through his pores. No doubt the torturer and his cronies would take the increased sweating as a sign of their work's success.

  The smell of his own perspiration stung Godolkin's nostrils, but he ignored it, filtering it out. He was rapidly building up a mental picture of the room around him; how the steel trolley lay in relation to the walls, where its occupants stood or sat. It was a mental technique he had long since learned to perfect. During his elite training, when he had been raised from line-trooper to Iconoclast First-Class, he had often been required to enter combat while blindfolded. Those bloody, gladiatorial exercises had served him well - even lying on his back with a cloth hood on his head, he could tell how far away the walls were by the echoes of the torturer's voice, where the men in the room stood or sat by their breathing, their smell, their heartbeats.

  The torturer was still sitting beside him, leaning close, certain of his own safety, his superiority over the captive. One of the assistants was standing on his far side, poised to deliver more drugs. The third man stood at Godolkin's head. And therein lay a problem.

  He needed the third man to move, if he was to prevail against the interrogation.

  "I'll ask you again, alien. How do you feel?"

  "Afraid," he lied.

  Faint sounds reached Godolkin through the hood. The man was sitting back slightly. Godolkin factored it into his soundscape of the room.

  All three of his interrogators were men. Two had remained silent throughout, but he could gauge their gender by hormonal odour. He was glad that the assistants were male. Godolkin had no compunction against killing women, but, on the whole, men tended to struggle less.

  "What are you afraid of?"

  "Falling," said Godolkin.

  A beat of silence. It was not the answer the torturer had been expecting. Godolkin knew more about the mechanics of interrogation than most men, and if there was one thing certain about the art it was that there were no certainties. The drugs, the needles, the tongs and the blades all affected different people in differ
ent ways. No two subjects were ever alike.

  "Why do you fear falling?"

  "My leg strap is loose," Godolkin breathed. "If it comes away, I'll fall again."

  Godolkin was no actor, but his allusion to his recent journey rang true. The man at his head moved at some wordless signal from the torturer, down to the other end of the trolley.

  When he was halfway there, Godolkin sat up.

  The strap across his chest sheared, the heavy canvas snapping apart at the point where it was stitched to the trolley's frame. The effort made his stomach muscles scream, but his leverage was well-judged. Godolkin had been surreptitiously testing the strength of his restraints since they had been locked over him, tensing against them to feel how flexible they were, how brittle.

  The lesson he had applied back in Zimri's tower was just as relevant here. Every system had a weak spot.

  The straps around his arms gave him no more trouble than that around his torso. He tore them both free at once. A needle brushed his left bicep but he simply reached past it and grabbed the arm that held it, shattering the thin wrist bones with one squeeze. One man fell away, allowing Godolkin to grab at the second assistant, dragging him back down onto the trolley and slamming his elbow down to crack the man's skull.

  Before the body hit the floor, Godolkin had whipped around to his other side and snatched at the torturer. He took hold of the man's throat with one hand and pulled him close, ripping the hood free as he did so.

  The bland face was white with terror.

  "Do you have a name, knifeman?" Godolkin asked him.

  "Silic..."

  "Well, Silic, I must inform you that this interrogation is at an end. But it would be such a pity to waste all this fine equipment, don't you think?"

  Godolkin stayed with Silic for twenty minutes, until the torturer's heart stilled from shock.