Divination - John French Read online

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Tristana.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Viola. ‘You were caught.’

  Tristana held her gaze for a long moment, then turned and began to move to the base of a stacked ziggurat of shelves. Mounds of torn parchment covered its tiers like dirty snow. High on its flanks a great growth of fungus glowed with an oily, green light.

  ‘This is it,’ said Tristana, gesturing up. ‘This is Sub-Stack 210-1. Whatever you hope to find, it’s in there.’

  Viola shook her head.

  ‘I don’t think anything legible or useful is in there, do you?’

  Tristana laughed.

  ‘Could have told you that and saved you your life a long while back. Why do you think they let you and idiots like you down here? Because there is nothing here left to find.’

  ‘But we did find what we wanted,’ said Viola. ‘We found you.’

  Tristana pivoted, gun rising smoothly.

  ‘Be still,’ she said, voice strong and calm. ‘I am a thief but I can be a murderer too. You are already dead from the poison you drank to get down here, but I am more than happy to complete the transaction.’

  Viola kept still, but she had begun to shake now. Cold was winding through her, and all she could do was think of the sweet taste of the poison on her lips. She glanced down at the hourglass at her waist. There was still more sand in the upper half than had poured into the bottom.

  At the corner of her sight she could just see where Covenant and Severita had frozen.

  ‘Who sent you?’ snapped Tristana.

  Viola gave a small, sad smile.

  ‘You didn’t trust us,’ she said. ‘That’s why you talked so much, trying to find out if we were what we said.’

  ‘You are no fortune hunters, I could tell it as soon as I saw you. So, who sent you?’

  ‘No one,’ said Viola, ‘but we found what we came for. Tell me, how long did it take you to memorise the Tractate Serith?’

  Tristana stared, then fired into Viola’s face.

  FOUR

  ‘You had a thief,’ said Cleander.

  ‘No one steals from our archives,’ snarled Sardus. ‘Not in part, not in whole.’

  ‘They do, actually,’ said Cleander mildly, ‘but I will admit that very few are successful. Most you catch, and most die, and those that attempt and fail, you send down into the Dead Archives, and most of them die down there of something hideous, and those that live never get to leave.’ He paused and picked at the skin beside a nail on his left hand. ‘I have done my research, you see.’

  He looked up at Sardus and Ki, and folded his hands on his lap.

  ‘Go on,’ said Ki carefully.

  ‘The thing about thieves is that they rarely steal from just one person. A decade ago, a very subtle, very clever thief stole from me. She stole something very dear to me and the theft cost me more in pride and reputation than it would ever have been worth in coin.’

  Sardus broke into a laugh then, the sound hovering between a wheezing rattle and a cough.

  ‘And where she eluded you, we caught her, is that it?’ he asked.

  ‘She is here on your world,’ said Cleander, ‘and she is still alive.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Ki.

  ‘I know,’ said Cleander, his voice soft and dangerous. ‘Time and wealth open all paths and all doors.’

  ‘So you are here for vengeance on a thief?’ asked Ki, frowning.

  ‘I am not a man given to forgiveness,’ he said.

  ‘Neither are we,’ said Ki. ‘But I am not…’

  ‘I want your prisoner.’

  ‘If she is here and if she lives,’ said Sardus, ‘then she will be one of the walkers of the Dead Archives. We do not track their kind, and we do not go beyond the doors of those realms.’

  ‘I do not want you to deliver her to me,’ said Cleander. ‘I simply want to know where she might be – one simple bit of knowledge, remember. The rest is up to me.’

  The silence stretched for long seconds. Cleander could hear the buzz and thrum of Josef’s armour.

  ‘We do not let those who walk the Dead Archives back beyond the doors,’ said Ki, at last.

  Cleander looked around at Josef, who gave a nod of acknowledgement and lifted a heavy metal box into the space before the Master Archivists. The lid released and hinged back with a buzz of static. A smell like frost and metal filled the room. The space within glimmered cold blue with the light of the stasis field wrapping the open book within. Faded script marched across foxed pages beside curling illuminations of beasts, angels and fire. Sardus began to tremble.

  ‘That…’ he began.

  ‘The Testament of Tertia, follower of Sebastian Thor, compiled in his lifetime on Terra itself.’

  Ki looked pale.

  ‘So,’ said Cleander, ‘can you give me what I want?’

  X

  The blast from Tristana’s gun unfolded towards Viola’s head. She had a moment in which every detail of the world was a still image held behind blurred glass…

  Then everything dissolved into a whirl of colour and a scream of noise and sensation. She was tumbling, wrapped in a bubble and yanked through a void where emotion became sound and shape. She wanted to gasp, to scream, but there was no air and nowhere for her thought to go but into the riot of form and light all around her.

  And then she was standing in the archive. Tristana’s gun flared three metres away to her right. Rounds sliced through air. Tristana whirled, eyes wide, gun rising. A bolt round hit the gun’s muzzle and exploded. Tristana reeled. Severita advanced towards their guide, pistols raised. Viola opened her mouth, the sugar-and-bile taste of the warp displacement almost bringing vomit up her throat.

  ‘Don’t run,’ she called. ‘We–’

  But Tristana spun and dived backwards, reached the side of a ziggurat of shelves and swung up. Viola moved to follow. Severita was faster, holstering one of her two bolt pistols and bounding up a rusted ladder like a cat. Tristana paused, balanced on a projecting shelf and drew and threw a spear in a single motion. Severita yanked herself upwards just in time. The spear struck the ladder just where she had been. Electro-charge burst from the shaft and leapt up the ladder’s rungs. Severita’s back arched, her hand locking to the ladder as the charge whipped through her.

  ‘Tristana!’ shouted Viola. She was at the base of the ziggurat now, her hands shaking with the warp displacement that had saved her life. ‘You can live, Tristana, you can leave this place.’

  But if Tristana heard the words, she was not listening. She was already at the first tier in the pyramid of shelves and running along it sideways to an intact ladder leading upwards.

  Covenant went past Viola, and up a twisted ladder. His shotgun was sheathed across his back, but the flechette blaster in his shoulder spun and fired as he climbed. The darts buzzed as they punched through the air. The shelves and platform in front of Tristana exploded under hundreds of impacts. She half fell, caught herself, turned her fall into a roll and was up again, sprinting for another way up the next face of shelves.

  Viola reached the ladder and began to climb after Covenant. Her hands felt numb, her skin clammy. She glanced to her side as Severita reached down and grasped the spear embedded in the ladder next to her. Whips of blue charge snapped around her hand. Viola could see Severita’s lips moving in silent prayer as her skin began to char. Then the spear was tumbling down to the floor, broken, and Severita was leaping up the rungs and shelves.

  Tristana paused and raised her head. A high looping note rang through the air from her mouth, echoing and vanishing into the gloom. Then she was moving again, springing from hand-hold to hand-hold while Covenant’s blaster shredded the books and shelves in her path. Tristana did not slow or stop.

  She knows we are not shooting to kill, thought Viola. She knows we want her alive.<
br />
  Covenant had reached the first tier. Viola could see a glow building around the inquisitor’s head. The air around him was shivering. Frost formed on the rotting books. Severita was just a few metres beneath Tristana. The guide paused and twisted to draw another spear. A wave of force ripped up through the shelves from Covenant. Rusted metal and rotten parchment exploded outwards. The telekinetic wave struck Tristana and ripped her from the face of the stack. She fell, thrashing in the air for a hold on the emptiness rushing past. She hit the tier that Covenant stood on with a wet crack of breaking bone.

  Viola pulled herself up the last rungs and onto the platform. She was breathing hard. She was cold… very, very cold…

  Tristana was rising to her feet. Her left arm hung crooked and limp at her side. There was blood on her face. But her eyes were cold with pain.

  ‘You will come with us,’ said Covenant.

  Tristana stood, her gaze moving from Viola to Covenant and then up to where Severita hung from the shelves above, gun aimed.

  ‘We can set you free,’ shouted Viola.

  A bloody smile formed on Tristana’s face.

  ‘You want the book, don’t you? You want the tractate. Do you know how long it took me to memorise?’

  ‘Minutes,’ said Viola. ‘You have a stratified and data-perfect memory, Tristana. A glance at a page of text or stream of numbers and it is yours forever. That’s how you stole the Tractate Serith from the archive.’

  Tristana’s smile curled at the edge to show teeth, pink with blood.

  ‘You know, after a while I got used to never getting out of here. Survive anything for long enough and it becomes normal. As long as those bastards never realised what I had, that I got away with their precious book – things like that keep you warm, keep you alive, keep you free.’

  ‘You can be truly free,’ said Viola, trying to edge closer to Tristana. Her legs were becoming numb, though. ‘All we want is–’

  ‘You wanted to be certain it was me, didn’t you?’ said Tristana. ‘That’s why we came all the way down here, so that you could listen and ask questions and be certain before you made your offer.’

  ‘We–’ began Viola.

  ‘You are Inquisition, aren’t you?’ asked Tristana. None of them moved or answered. ‘All those years ago the buyers for what I have in my head said that if something went really wrong, someone like you might come for me. And here you are…’ She laughed, the sound thin and humourless.

  ‘You will be free,’ said Covenant, and the sound of his voice jerked Tristana’s head up.

  ‘That is a lie,’ she said, and the smile was gone from her lips. Her eyes twitched up to the dark above. Something in the gesture sent ice running through Viola’s flesh. And above them in the gloom piled above the stack pyramid a high, ululating cry rose as though in answer to the cry of Tristana.

  ‘I shall not be free,’ said Tristana. ‘But I shall live.’ And from above, the creatures of the Dead Archive came in a blur of pale chitin and parchment wings.

  FIVE

  ‘You wish nothing else asked?’ questioned Ki. ‘Just to know where the thief might be in the underworld?’

  Cleander nodded, then gave a small shrug. ‘A little help getting into this place of horror and mystery you call a Dead Archive, but other than that, no, nothing.’

  Silence again. Cleander felt the stillness creep around the room. He heard Josef shift uncomfortably in his power armour and wondered if the preacher was feeling overdressed.

  At last Ki turned her head and nodded at Sardus.

  ‘We agree to your offer,’ she said.

  ‘Splendid,’ said Cleander, with a grin that he almost felt. He reached down to pour fresh water into his glass and then paused. He held the glass up, still unfilled. ‘I don’t suppose you have something a little stronger, do you?’

  XI

  No one had given the creatures a name. Bred down in the lost edges of the stacks they had gorged on vermin and parchment pulp as larvae, and shed their worm bodies and soft bulk to become things of buzzing wings and hard carapace. Legs hung beneath pale thoraxes. Sets of six wings beat the air, filling it with soft, white dust. Viola saw clusters of eyes glow pale white as the swarm rose above the stack and plunged down towards them.

  Covenant’s shoulder gun pivoted and fired. He turned, shotgun in hand, head haloed with witch-light. A wall of telekinetic force met the swarm. Wings tore from bodies. Chitin cracked. Shreds of meat hit the platform like red sleet. Viola saw Tristana bound to the edge of the platform and jump.

  ‘No!’ shouted Viola, but even with a broken arm Tristana moved with fluid grace. The thief bounded down the racked face of shelves to the ground below. A hand yanked Viola aside. A bolt pistol roared. One of the winged creatures exploded in the space where she had been.

  ‘Start shooting!’ shouted Severita from next to her. A pale shape buzzed down at them. Severita turned to meet it and the space between gun muzzles and beast burned. Viola squeezed her right hand, found her pistol still in her grasp. Her eye went to where Tristana was dropping down the cliff of shelves, almost at the floor beneath. She ran for the edge of the platform, not hearing the shouts as she gripped a twisted ladder and swung down. Pain burned in the muscles of her shoulders. Her sword was gone, dropped somewhere up on the platform above.

  Tristana had reached the floor of the chamber and was beginning to sprint away into the shadows. A blow struck Viola across the back of her head. She spun, gripping onto the ladder. One of the winged things was above her, mandibles snapping as they tried to fasten on her. Its wings beat around her head. Dust filled her mouth and eyes. The thing was shrieking and chittering. She rammed the barrel of her las pistol up and squeezed the trigger. Energy blasted up through the creature’s head and wings. Its cries rose, wet and gurgling. Viola punched the gun into it, still firing. The thing tumbled away, spiralling, bleeding. More were swarming down onto the stack pyramid. Viola half fell down the ladder. A rune flickered from amber to green at the edge of her view through her bionic eye. She blinked a fast activation sequence. The vox bead in her ear squawked.

  ‘Brother, if you want to put in an appearance…’

  ‘Apologies,’ came Cleander’s voice, relaxed to the point of boredom even through the vox crackle. ‘Difficult travel conditions. Here now.’

  Figures in bronzed armour were advancing out of the spaces between the shelf stacks. Glowing light snagged on helm visors and gun casings. A chorus of building charge rose to meet the chatter of the winged creatures.

  ‘Fire,’ said Cleander’s voice over the vox. Red bolts of energy blurred through the air. Creatures fell. Viola could see a full squad of household troopers, and at their front the armoured bulk of Josef, and the tall figure of her brother, sword in hand. He and Josef had secured the location of Tristana and then made their way here via a longer route to provide a net should she prove difficult to take down. Now they were between Tristana and the maze of shelves.

  Viola was at the bottom of the stack pyramid. Gunfire flashed and roared amongst the swarm. It wheeled in the air, re-forming even as individuals were torn from it. They corkscrewed in the dark, dozens of pale winged bodies. Then they dived. Viola stumbled, and saw Tristana sprawl as the cloud of creatures skimmed the ground. She had a second to see Josef punch a creature from the air, his power-armoured bulk surging as his fist went clean through its thorax. She saw Cleander’s sword light and rise. Then the swarm was between them, and the world was filled with the buzz of wings and clouds of dust.

  Tristana was trying to get to her feet. A creature hit the thief on the back and sent her to the floor. Viola swore and found the displacer field projector on her waist, and switched it to inactive. The swarm was a layer of wings and bodies boiling a metre off the ground. She scrambled forwards, head low, and grasped the other woman’s leg. Tristana tried to kick free. A creature buzzed low above them
. Viola sprawled but did not let go.

  ‘You want to live, stay still,’ she shouted.

  ‘You are dying, Viola, if that is your name.’ shouted Tristana. ‘You can barely hold on to me. The hag takes her price. Always.’

  Viola could feel the cold numbness spreading through her.

  ‘Be still, come with us,’ she managed to say.

  ‘You will kill me,’ snarled Tristana.

  ‘You are doing a good job of killing yourself without us!’

  Viola felt something hit her on the shoulder, tried to turn, but coldness was flooding through her. She tried to turn her head, but could not feel her neck. The edge of her sight was grey. She saw Tristana look at her, her mouth moving in an oath or a shout, but all she could hear was the beating of the wings and the feel of soft, grey dust in her throat. She thought of the hag and the chalice, and the withered woman’s smile as she had refilled the cup of poison.

  ‘Life for the dead. Death for the living…’

  The world was draining from grey to black.

  XII

  Viola woke. Not the slow rising from deep sleep or the blurred emergence from a drug daze, but clean sudden waking, like a light turning on in a night-filled room. She moved her shoulders, felt the stiffness of a sutured wound. The familiar hum of the Dionysia slid into her ears. She was in a room of brushed steel and bright light.

  ‘The tears of truth,’ said Tristana, ‘that’s what they call it. Causes para­lysis, deafness, blindness, and then death.’

  Viola focused on the figure in front of her. A blue and red smock and trews had replaced the hide armour and patchwork clothes Tristana had worn in the Dead Archive. The ash, dust and grime had gone from her skin, too, but the patterns of burn scars and ink tattoos still ran across her neck and up her cheeks. A plasteel brace wrapped her right arm and shoulder.

  Viola tried to move her own arm and fingers and found that she could. She thought about moving, and started to shrug free from the restraints.

  ‘The medicae said that you were not to move. They were very firm on that, in fact,’ said Tristana.