Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave Page 3

  Here was a long, terrifying pause. The shell had a window, a domed diamond-analogue viewport. He could see flames lapping towards him, dragged into twisting points of vapour by the airflow.

  The face of a servitor, half burned away, slammed against the port.

  Harrow screamed in horror and as if on cue, the shell's explosive latches fired. The little vessel shuddered violently, almost shaking Harrow free of his handhold. He felt acceleration yank him as the shell engaged a reaction drive, blasting it free of the asteroid.

  They were away.

  Harrow gave a whoop of triumph. Against all odds, they had made it.

  There was one last piece of equipment he hadn't used; a comm-linker, keyed to Crimson Hunter's code-frequencies. The yacht wasn't sentient by any means; the art of building intelligent machines had long since been lost to the universe. But it had enough sense to come when it was called.

  Harrow glanced across at Red. She was beginning to shiver violently and her eyes roved ceaselessly under her lids. He knew that her mutations gave her quite startling regenerative powers, and had witnessed her recover from near-crippling injuries in a matter of days. But this was the worst he had ever seen her. Even though he had finally located and carried her to freedom, he began to wonder if she would survive.

  Past her, in the shell's domed viewport, he caught a glimpse of the temple asteroid. Flickers of light were showing around its edge.

  For a moment he wasn't sure what he was seeing, whether there actually were tiny flares around the giant rock's periphery, or if it was just a trick of the eye. But as he watched, he saw that the floating mountain was moving, very slightly, against the backdrop of stars.

  Manoeuvring thrusters. The asteroid was rotating around its axis towards him.

  Harrow didn't like the look of this at all. He didn't know why the Osculum might be re-orientating their temple, and he wasn't quite sure he wanted to. He was very glad indeed when he felt Hunter's parasite grabs latch onto the life-shell and draw it close.

  As the two vessels embraced, Crimson Hunter opened its airlock. Harrow opened up the life-shell and carried Red over the threshold and into the yacht, easing her gently down onto the deck. She mumbled something and curled into a ball.

  The airlock was still open. Harrow turned to close it, and saw through the life-shell's viewport why the Osculum had been turning their asteroid around. They were bringing their guns to bear.

  The sky was yellow with antimat fire.

  Great gouts of raw energy were ripping out of the asteroid towards him. Antimat guns were the kind of ordnance used by capital ships against each other. If one of those ragged bolts even clipped Hunter, the little yacht would be annihilated in an instant.

  Harrow slammed his hand flat against the lock control, and even before the doors had cycled shut he was in the command throne.

  Suddenly, Hunter fizzed. Harrow felt a thrill of latent electricity race through the vessel's structure, making the console lights flicker, sending tiny blue-white sparks up from the controls and into his fingertips. One of the antimat bolts must have come close, within a kilometre.

  The next salvo could be right on target. Harrow brought the fusion core up to full power, gripped the throttle bar and poured energy into the drives. The ship leapt forwards, maximum thrust forcing Harrow back into the seat cushions. Distantly he heard Red sliding backwards along the deck as the acceleration grew, but his attention was fixed on the superlight indicators. Bars of light were growing there, reaching towards maximum…

  He hit the jump key and, with a thunder of phased-transfer engines, Hunter left the universe of men for a better, cleaner place.

  * * * *

  Durham Red was safe aboard his vessel. The ship was in jumpspace, heading off on the first of a series of programmed spatial leaps guaranteed to throw the Osculum off his trail. He hadn't been caught and turned into a drooling bacchanal.

  All things considered, Judas Harrow was quite pleased with the way things had turned out.

  He sat back in the command throne for a moment or two, allowing himself to relax for the first time in eight months. He felt he deserved it. Not for too long, though: Durham Red needed medical attention, and quickly. Luckily, Harrow had kitted Hunter out with an advanced medicom unit and a trauma spider, just in case.

  There was a sound behind him, a scraping. He turned, and was stunned to see Red hauling herself upright. "Holy one," he whispered. "What—"

  At the sound of his voice, she snapped around. There was nothing in her eyes but scarlet madness, nothing in her voice save an awful, steam-kettle hiss of pure animal rage. Fangs bared, she leaped.

  She was on him before he could move, before he could speak, backhanding him with impossible strength into the wall of the cabin. His skull slammed into the metal, detonating novas of pain behind his eyes. He felt the deck whirl up and smash into the side of his face.

  He tried to say something, anything, but words were beyond him. It was all he could do to keep breathing.

  A shadow fell across him. The last thing he felt, before darkness became the world, was Durham Red's fangs at his throat.

  2

  Relics

  There was a wind coming up off the Great Scour, fast and brutally cold. Matteus Godolkin could feel it buffet him as he stood on the tower roof, could feel the frost it carried stinging the exposed skin of his face around the breath-mask.

  He was alone on the roof, which was his preference. It was the place where he felt most able to meditate properly. The meditorium, at the back of the chapel, was too cluttered for him to feel completely at peace, and he didn't really like the Vision Hall much either. There was no point being able to see the harsh landscape of Lavannos, he had decided, if you couldn't feel it.

  Lavannos was a deadly little place, a bitter, frozen enemy of a world. Matteus Godolkin had no time for an enemy he could not face.

  The tower had a surrounding wall, waist high, turning its flat, square top into a terrace of sorts. Godolkin gripped the wall tightly, his big hands almost as white as the smooth stone under them, daring the wind to strike him. It was a habit he had grown into over the past few months; every day he would climb up through the tower, barely noticing the exertion of the multiple flights of steps, and make his way onto the roof. There he would stand, for hours at a time, feeling the frosty wind cut into his scarred, bleached-out skin, chilling his augmented bones. The daytime temperature on the bright face of Lavannos rarely rose above thirty degrees below zero. Without fail, Godolkin went up to the roof stripped to the waist.

  His only admission of weakness was the breath-mask. Matteus Godolkin could do many things, but not even he could breathe the rarefied atmosphere of Lavannos for very long.

  "Quite beautiful, isn't it? In a lethal kind of way…"

  Godolkin didn't turn away from the wall. He had heard the abbot climbing the stairs behind him—the last three flights, in fact. "I had not noticed."

  "Come now, Matteus. Are you trying to tell me that an Iconoclast has no appreciation of beauty?"

  The abbot walked briskly across the roof and joined Godolkin at the wall. He was tall, although nowhere near as tall as the Iconoclast, and slender. A heavy thermocowl was draped over his narrow, stoop-shouldered frame, and his long hands were covered with electrically warmed gloves. His breath-mask was a full-face design. Godolkin looked across at him and saw himself reflected in twin lenses as bulbous and facetted as the eyes of an insect.

  He pondered for a moment. He and the abbot had spoken of many things over the months, but beauty wasn't one of them. "Perhaps our training requires us to be more… focussed. To see beauty would be an inefficiency and dangerous. We might be required to destroy that beauty without hesitation."

  "And recognising it might give you pause?"

  "Anything that slows the reactions is potentially fatal."

  The abbot nodded. "Yes, I can see that. Still…" He gestured at the frozen vista before them. "Appreciate it now, Godolkin. Have
a good look at that and tell me you see no beauty."

  An exercise, then. Godolkin was always ready to test himself. He looked.

  And saw…

  The sky of Lavannos was split in two across a shallow diagonal. Above the horizon, wider to the west, was a narrow, curving strip of deep, rich blue, turning almost black at its highest point. Above that, and covering three-quarters of the sky, was the vast, yellow-orange ball of the gas giant Mandus. Wide, stormy belts of darker cloud roiled and swarmed across the face of the giant, constantly changing in a slow, ceaselessly chaotic crawl.

  As for Lavannos itself, Godolkin had never seen a world like it.

  At some time in its distant past, the little planet had been exposed to a source of heat that beggared comprehension: the entire surface, to a depth of dozens of kilometres, had been rendered liquid. And then, while that liquid had still been leaping and frothing with huge bubbles of superheated gas, Lavannos had abruptly refrozen. Whatever geological variations the planet had once possessed were boiled away in that searing heat, leaving a landscape of gleaming black glass. The surface was peppered with great blisters and cysts, rough as plague-wracked flesh.

  Gravity, and the stresses of close orbit around Mandus, had caused most of the bubbles to collapse under their own weight. The crust had been left pockmarked with craters, deep and smooth-sided, their bases littered with shards of obsidian which were sharp enough to scythe a man in two.

  The largest crater was also the closest: Eye of God was ninety kilometres across, and almost thirty deep. Its base was forever lost to darkness and its near-vertical sides rimed with metres of frost. The gaze of the Lord, however, was slightly lopsided; God's Pupil, an unbroken bubble of glistening black glass the size of a small town, rose off-centre and misshapen from its depths.

  The Church of the Arch, and the tower on which Godolkin and the abbot now stood, nestled close to the rim of Eye of God. The drop in front of the building was sheer, and kilometres deep.

  To the east, Godolkin's right, the congress of two cysts formed the lethal Bridge of Splinters. To his left lay the Great Scour, shallow and ragged and wide enough to swallow fleets. North of that was the part-collapsed blister of Fracture Peak, and in the distance, half hidden beneath drifting slopes of ice, rose the gaping maw of Mount Solace.

  Cysts and craters, black glass and white frost: Lavannos was a lifeless, oily foam. Godolkin had seen lovelier cesspools.

  * * * *

  The abbot was waiting. "It is," Godolkin admitted finally, "impressive."

  Beside him, the older man gave a wry chuckle. "And is that your tactical appraisal?"

  "No. That would take longer."

  The abbot nodded. "I would be intrigued to hear it, my friend." He glanced about, his movements reduced to mime by mask and cowl. "But not here. My bones, unlike yours, are just made of bone. And they get cold."

  The abbot had quarters two levels down, under the Vision Hall. It was warmer there. Godolkin removed his breath-mask and shrugged into a heavy, armoured jacket, then fastened his grey attendant's cloak around his throat. The abbot had stripped away his mask and thermocowl on the way down.

  The rooms were not especially large, although they were considerably bigger than those occupied by Godolkin and the rest of the attendants. Simple rugs lay on the floors, while plain luminescent panels provided light. The walls were unadorned and slightly narrower at the ceiling than they were at the floor, following the slope-sided profile of the tower.

  The abbot liked to keep things simple, Godolkin had learned. He had only one indulgence the Iconoclast was aware of. "I'm making tea. Would you care to join me?"

  Godolkin nodded and found a chair that would take his weight, while the abbot fussed with hot water and tiny cups and a tall, long-stemmed teapot. He had taken tea with the old man several times since arriving at the Church; the abbot seemed to enjoy engaging the Iconoclast in conversation, although Godolkin did the lesser share of talking by far. He had once asked the abbot why he was singled out for these discussions; there were other attendants at the retreat, after all. The abbot had told him, other than for his interesting past, it was because most of the others had taken a vow of silence.

  Godolkin had to admit that would make things difficult. He had made no such pledge himself; he had taken vows in the past and had seen them come to ruin. He would not do so lightly again.

  The abbot was coming over to join him, carrying a small tray. Two cups, perched on exquisite saucers, steamed on it. "Sugar?"

  Godolkin shook his head, then sniffed. "The composition is different today."

  "Well spotted, Het." The abbot lifted a cup to his lips and sipped delicately. "Mmm. This is, I am reliably informed, a tea called Earl Grey. It dates back to pre-Accord times; an archeotech who stayed here recently taught me the trick of it, and gave me a living tea-plant. I keep it in the Vision Hall, where it can find at least a little sun."

  Godolkin reached for a cup. His fingers were too large to go through the tiny, looped handle, so he wrapped his whole hand around the container, feeling its warmth against his massive palm.

  He brought the steaming liquid closer and sniffed it again. And as its fragrance reached his nostrils he had a sudden vision: a massive warrior, his grey-white skin a network of scars and intricate charm-tattoos, sitting in a comfortable chair with a hot cup of tea in his hand. He blinked, suddenly amazed at himself. "Insane," he muttered.

  "Excuse me?"

  Godolkin looked at the old man. "Het Abbot, I am—I was—an Iconoclast First-Class, a warrior in unswerving service of the Accord. I have led planet-wide purges, overseen the execution of thousands. I have watched oceans boil and continents burn. And yet here I am, sipping leaf-infusions from ceramic containers, discussing the finer points of tea-making…" He shook his head. "An insane situation."

  The abbot shrugged. "The universe is brimming with insane situations, Het. Wars fought over the most trivial genetic differences have killed billions. Worlds starve in order to meet planetary tithes that no longer have any meaning. Battlefleets powerful enough to snuff out suns are sent to punish the misdemeanours of a single man."

  "And vampires live among us," Godolkin whispered, staring into his teacup.

  "One, at least." The abbot lifted his own cup in ironic salute. "And there, Iconoclast First-Class, is the whole root of your problem."

  * * * *

  Of all the mad horrors in the universe, it was the vampire that had occupied Matteus Godolkin the most.

  In the aftermath of the Bloodshed—as historians had come to call the great war between human and mutant—the Iconoclasts had become the most potent military force in the Pan-Species Accord. Their evolution had begun during the Bloodshed itself, but had accelerated massively during its final stages. Their duties had now grown far beyond the simple protection of the human species: they were charged with suppression of mutant activity on a thousand fronts, collection of planetary tithes, patrol of Accord territorial borders and most important of all, the complete annihilation of the underground mutant cadre known as the Tenebrae.

  For their part, the Tenebrae represented the dripping knife-edge of anti-humanism. The days when they had been a simple sect of blood-worshippers were long gone. United behind the image of Saint Scarlet of Durham, they had become a potent military organisation; secret yet overt, hidden yet able and willing to strike with genocidal force. Only the vastness of the inhabited galaxy allowed them to remain little more than myth in most quarters, and yet command battlefleets.

  Iconoclast and Tenebrae: never before or since had two more bitterly opposed forces come to be.

  The Tenebrae drew strength from their worship of the arch-vampire, Durham Red. The Iconoclasts believed with unshakeable conviction that the vampire was the most deadly threat to the human race that existed. Thus, they became vampire-killers.

  Iconoclast soldiers were not simply indoctrinated to hate and fear the vampire or trained to kill it; they were physically altered for the t
ask. Counter-vampire charms were burned into their skins, a network of sacred tattoos protecting their arteries and surface blood vessels. Their bones were reinforced, their nervous systems rewired. Eyes were altered to receive input from vision amplifiers, their senses of smell, taste and hearing jacked-up to insane levels. An Iconoclast at the height of their powers could hear a man's heartbeat at ten metres, a breath at a hundred. He could see thermal differences of a tenth of a degree.

  He could detect a mutant by smell alone.

  All this, Matteus Godolkin could do. And when he finally met a vampire, a real one, none of it was the slightest use.

  In response to a wild tale of the mythical Saint Scarlet's revival, Godolkin and his team had been sent to purge the university world of Wodan. Unfortunately for him, the tale had been true. Durham Red herself had attacked him.

  That had been something of a surprise. But up to the last moment, just before her great leap had brought her teeth to his throat, he had still believed he would prevail. His charms, his training, his belief would save him.

  He'd been wrong, of course.

  She had knocked him flat, torn the anti-vampire weapons from his grasp, ripped away his vision amplifier, and sunk her fangs into his neck. Which would have been the end of Matteus Godolkin and all his works, had the Blasphemy's mutant companion, Judas Harrow, not hauled her away.

  Every day, without fail, Matteus Godolkin climbed to the top of the tower at the Church of the Arch and stood staring out over the Eye of God, willing the Almighty to somehow transport him back to that day and let Durham Red take those last, fatal drops.

  He was trapped by her now. Her poison was in his blood, her fangs at his throat no matter how far apart the two of them were. From that moment on, Godolkin had ceased to be a warrior of the Accord and had become a slave to the fiend herself. The Blasphemy's word had become his law.

  It was intolerable and horrible. He was sworn to destroy her, and yet, with a single utterance from her, he was bound to protect her. For weeks after that day he had been her unwilling companion, until finally, blessedly, she had grown tired of him and Harrow. Told them they were cramping her style, whatever that might have meant. She had ordered Godolkin to leave her side; a command he followed willingly.