Liar's Due - Ben Swallow Read online

  ‘What do you want?’ Leon said, at last.

  His father frowned and turned away. ‘Do something useful. Take the kitchen remains to the burner.’

  Leon waited until he was gone, and then replaced the shell. He put the copy of the Insignum Astartes back on the shelf, where it would be pressed flat and kept safe, and then dolefully took up the duty he had been given.

  He walked across the dusty patch of grass behind the dormitory house to where the maw of the burner protruded from its underground hollow, and kicked the grate open with his feet. Leon let his mind wander, pretending instead he was on Terra, walking the halls of the Emperor’s Palace; but then the stink of the burner reached him and the pleasant illusion was destroyed. Scowling, he poured the pail of slops into the drop tube and let the furnace start its work.

  Through habit, he looked up at the Skyhook. At this time of day, the sun was throwing the space elevator’s shadow directly over the building.

  In the shade, Leon found Esquire Mendacs sitting cross-legged on the grass with a water flask and a cloth bag at his side. The remembrancer was working at a pict-screen, moving a stylus across it. He saw the youth and threw him a wan smile, beckoning him over.

  He left the pail and wiped his hands on the thighs of his trousers. ‘Beg pardon, esquire,’ Leon said as he came closer. ‘If I smell a little. The kitchen remains, I was just disposing of them.’

  Mendacs nodded. ‘It doesn’t notice. Are you well, Leon?’

  ‘Well enough.’ He nodded at the hand-held screen. ‘What is that you’re doing there?’

  ‘See for yourself.’ Mendacs offered him the device, and Leon took it gingerly, cautious not to touch any of the tabs or buttons around the pict-screen’s frame.

  A half-finished image was centred in the middle of the display, a line sketch of the township from the shallow rise where the dormitory house sat. The rise of the Skyhook dominated the drawing.

  Leon felt a brief flash of jealousy. Mendacs’s skill with the pen was an order of magnitude beyond the youth’s crude attempts, and even the incomplete piece here made his scribblings look like the work of an infant. He nodded. ‘It’s impressive.’

  ‘It will be the basis for a digi-painting, perhaps,’ Mendacs said airily. ‘We’ll see when I’m finished with it.’

  When Leon didn’t answer, the remembrancer’s expression shifted and he frowned. The other man’s cool, steady gaze seemed to bore straight into the youth, and he wanted to look away.

  ‘Your father

  ’ Mendacs paused, feeling for the right words. ‘He doesn’t seem to have an appreciation for art.’

  Leon gave a glum nod. ‘Aye.’

  ‘Your mother did, though.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  Mendacs smiled. ‘Because you do, Leon. And because there are still traces of her lingering in your home.’ He stopped, suddenly concerned. ‘Forgive me. Am I speaking out of turn?’

  Leon shook his head. ‘No, no. You’re exactly right.’ He sighed. ‘I’d like to have the talent that you do, but I don’t.’

  ‘I’m sure your skills are balanced in other ways,’ offered the remembrancer.

  ‘My Da doesn’t seem to think so.’

  Mendacs studied him. ‘Fathers and sons always have a fractious relationship. This is a truth that spans the galaxy. One pulls against the other

  one rebels, defies

  The other tries to hold on to the old order of things, against reason.’

  ‘We don’t see eye to eye,’ Leon sighed. ‘He thinks the Imperium ignores us out here on the periphery. He tells me that it’s all far away and unreachable. Terra, and all those things.’

  ‘That is as much true as it is false,’ said Mendacs, ‘but I imagine Esquire Kyyter would not hear that.’ He leaned in. ‘Do you think he is right?’

  ‘No,’ Leon answered immediately. His temper began a slow burn. ‘He doesn’t see what I see. He’s blind, too set in his ways. And he wants me to follow in his footsteps. I’ve tried to get him to see things like I do, but he doesn’t want to hear it. He thinks

  ’ The young man paused. ‘I think he believes I’m turning on him.’

  ‘A traitor to your kin.’ Mendacs said the words without weight. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it? How fathers and sons can be so close but at the same time be so far apart?’ He paused and looked away. ‘Do you imagine that Horus Lupercal shared a measure of what you feel now, Leon?’

  ‘What?’ The question came from nowhere, and in its wake Leon felt unsettled. ‘No! I mean…’ He stopped and shook his head. ‘The Emperor and the primarchs are not like us.’ The idea seemed ludicrous.

  ‘No?’ Mendacs went back to his sketching, the stylus moving over the screen in small flicks of motion. ‘Even those who transcend humanity must stem from it. The bonds of family, of brotherhood and fatherhood

  They still exist in them. They cannot escape such truths.’ The remembrancer looked back at him. ‘Just like you, Leon. It is something that all men must face. The question: May I defy my father?’

  ‘The Warmaster’s defiance has cost the lives of millions,’ Leon blurted.

  Mendacs looked away again. ‘All choices have their price.’

  +++Broadcast Plus Twenty-Two Hours [Solar]+++

  Leon crouched by the windowsill, the lights in his room doused, straining to listen. From the township proper, the sounds of breaking glass and the crack of gunfire echoed up towards him. He felt hollow inside, watching the plumes of black smoke rising into the night sky. The faint glow of fires was visible through the lines of the alleyways; he guessed that the general store was burning, but he couldn’t understand why anyone would have wanted to put it to the torch.

  It was hours since his father had left, ordering him on no account to leave the dormitory house. Ames didn’t know that his son had seen him pick up the revolver he hid in the cellar, and tuck it into his waistband before he went. Leon tried to understand what that might mean. Why would his Da need a weapon, unless he knew that danger was coming to Forty-Four? Or was there another reason? Another kind of threat?

  Leon’s hands knitted and he looked around the room, the faint light throwing shadows over his pictures. He wanted to do something, but he didn’t know what it might be. None of his books or his drawings could give him any kind of answer.

  Then he heard the door close downstairs. Leon blinked and peered back out of the window; that seemed wrong. Had his father returned?

  Instead, he saw a shape in motion through the places where the light from the township didn’t fall, slipping away from the house. The figure was careful to stay in the shadows at all times, never once passing into the light.

  It could only have been Mendacs; but the man moved in a way Leon had never seen before, almost as if his entire body language had gone through a subtle shift. On an impulse he couldn’t quite grasp, the youth scrambled to his feet and went after him.

  The remembrancer’s course skirted the edges of the township, and having lived his entire life within its confines, Leon soon knew where Mendacs was heading. The alleyways and cut-backs the man took were part of the map of the youth’s world, places where he had run as a child and played at games of Great Crusade with his friends.

  Mendacs was heading for the base of the Skyhook, and his path avoided all the places where the citizens of Forty-Four were gathered. Keeping his distance, Leon tried not to let the sights around him distract him from the follow; but it was not easy to put aside the sounds of the fires and the screaming.

  At the corner of the Adjunct, some men had been hung from the lamp posts, and they swayed in the wind, the fibre cord about their necks creaking. Leon recognised faces from the tavern up there, now bloated and pale. Along the top of the mainway, it looked as if people had built barricades, although he was too far away to be sure. Once or twice he spied small groups of people armed with anything that could be turned into a weapon, some stalking the streets, others hiding in wait as if looking for something to ambush. Windows were stove in on some houses; he saw one with the name of the Warmaster daubed across the front door. H
e couldn’t tell if it was as a warning or as a mark of hate. And at the westerly point, a telegraph pole had been cut down with chainsaws, lying where it fell with a mess of torn wires about the head of it.

  Leon lost sight of Mendacs as the remembrancer approached the service block at the foot of the space elevator. He was distracted by a moment of angry shouting between two men that ended abruptly in the blast of a shot-rod. One of the voices was familiar to him: Kal Muudus, a neighbour from a few doors down the lane. He was yelling something about the Emperor, but his words were barely coherent.

  A moment of real fear washed over Leon and it took all his will to stay where he was in the shadows, and not run pell-mell back to the dormitory house.

  He stiffened, digging deep to find what small measure of courage he had. Leon’s world was collapsing around him as the day drew on, and in this instant of understanding, he questioned if Esquire Mendacs might have something to do with it. The tensions and unspoken discord between the settlers of Town Forty-Four had been there before Mendacs had arrived; but it was only after he came that they bubbled to the surface. Only after the remembrancer had taken residence had the darkness of the Great War out there seemed to reach its inky fingers towards the colony.

  Leon drew himself up and sprinted the distance to the service blockhouse. The door was locked shut, but there was a narrow vent shaft up above it that the youth was skinny enough to enter.

  He expected to be bombarded by the screams of alarms, but Leon dropped to the floor with only the clatter of his boots on the deck. He shrank into cover behind a cargo rig, but the sound of his arrival was lost in the steady background noise of the Skyhook’s inner workings.

  Even with the troubles in Town Forty-Four, the mechanised elevator went on regardless, ignoring the human drama beyond as it continually ferried trains of cargo capsules up to the orbital transfer station. A part of Leon was dazzled by his own daring at penetrating the blockhouse, and doing it with so little effort – but then he recalled that everyone in the settlement had been drilled with the warning never to enter the chambers within. Not only would the machines in there likely kill them by accident, but to do so was a violation of the colonial charter. Those found guilty of that were reclassified as indentured helots and sent to the frozen polar zones, to work off a decade or two on a punishment detail. Fear of that reprisal had kept the place sacrosanct.

  Now he was inside, Leon was fascinated by what he saw, the motion of the mech-arms, the rail points and the pod-trains. If an ant could have crawled inside a working rover engine, it might have experienced the same sights and sounds.

  Movement drew his eye to a line of six empty capsules, their gull-wing hatches all open. At the front of the line, Mendacs was leaning over a control console, working at buttons and switches with deft, singular focus. At once, a siren gave a low hoot, and the train began to move forwards, the hatches slowly dropping to seal shut. Mendacs grabbed his bags and threw them into the closest pod, before stepping in after.

  Leon came up out of the shadow as the train pulled away, the gaps left by the hatch doors growing smaller every second. He knew where the pods would be going, where Mendacs had to be going. Up, to the station, and off-world.

  If he did nothing, he would never know why, would never know what was happening to his town and his colony. But the risk

  the risk was more than he had ever known in his life.

  He took it anyway. At the last possible second, Leon sprinted to the rearmost pod of the train and ducked under the closing hatch. The pod rang as the door sealed shut with a hiss of air.

  The boy felt an abrupt shock of acceleration as the train moved onto the ascent rails; and then it settled onto a vertical rise and Leon tumbled into a corner, banging his head on an inner wall. Spirals of light behind his eyes followed him into darkness.

  The modified cogitator program did exactly what Mendacs wanted, shunting the cargo pods into a siding once they entered the transfer station, instead of moving the containers straight to unloading. He disembarked and gathered his gear, pausing only to throw a wry smile in the direction of the rear of the train, and then moved off.

  The gravity plates in the deck of the transfer station shifted the orientation of ‘up’ and ‘down’ so that the colony was actually at his back. The platform itself, at the three-quarter point of the Skyhook’s length, was a flat disc shaped like a three-lobed cog; each of the cog’s teeth was an automated loading airlock for freight tenders to nuzzle to, although all but one was vacant. The vessel at the occupied airlock was greatly undersized in comparison to the grain carriers that usually made port there. It was just a simple warp-cutter, little more than a courier ship. Mendacs had been careful to dock it at the upper tier, so that anyone with a telescope on the ground would not be able to see it.

  He didn’t go straight to his ship. First, he dumped the baggage – he wouldn’t need it for the last stage of the operation – and headed spinwards around the disc to the sealed astropath’s chambers.

  The laspistol he had carried on his arrival was still where he had left it, hanging by a lanyard from the hatch controls. Mendacs recovered it, checked the charge as a matter of course, and then opened the heavy steel door. He heard the crackle of the energy-dampening field as he stepped through.

  Nothing had changed; the astropath’s residence globe was as he’d left it, the iris hatch wide open, showing a glimpse of the padded zero-gravity space inside, the litter of debris still where it had fallen when he had been forced to pistol-whip the psyker to show the seriousness of his intent.

  And the astropath herself. Still there, lying in a heap, her sallow face and mane of coiled locks staring blankly up at the ceiling. Mendacs cocked his head, watching the play of a nimbus of green-orange light that enveloped the woman, the radiance issuing from an iron box the size of a man’s torso. The stasis generator had performed its function perfectly.

  He bent down on one knee and examined the astropath. Behind the glitter of the stasis field, she resembled an image from a video feed frozen in mid-motion. Mendacs didn’t understand the technology by which the device worked, knowing only that it could cast an envelope over a limited area, and within that barrier the passage of time slowed to a crawl. He had been on Virger-Mos II for almost two solar months, yet for the woman, only seconds would have passed. From her viewpoint, he would never have left.

  Mendacs reached down and touched the control to deactivate the field. It winked out, and the psyker jerked back into life.

  ‘Please, do not kill me!’ she wailed, resuming a conversation that was weeks past and forgotten.

  ‘I will let you live if you do something for me,’ he told her. ‘Send a message. Only that.’

  The astropath shook her head, and he held up the laspistol, pointing it at her face. She looked away, and then sighed.

  ‘It is not something that can be done at a whim. There must be preparations. A certain readiness is needed–’

  Mendacs held up his hands. ‘Don’t lie to me. You can transmit at a moment’s notice if need be. I’m not some Administratum tech that you wish to baffle with the mystery of your talent.’ He tapped the barrel of the pistol against his temple. ‘I know how you work.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Without correct foundation, I could be injured! The warp eats the unprepared mind. Please, do not force me!’

  She was a psyker of only minor talent; that was undeniable. The fact she was posted here, to this backwater instead of to a starship or colony of real note, confirmed that. The astropath’s days would have been a lonely, tedious string of parsing news from the core and the occasional communion with a comrade aboard a passing ship. Mendacs’s unexpected arrival was practically a gift.

  He pressed the laspistol muzzle into her cheek and regarded her impassively. ‘I have other means to send this on my ship,’ he said, ‘but I would prefer that you do it. If your answer remains no, this will end now.’

  At last the woman gave a nod. ‘Very well. To where do you wish me to speak?’ Mendacs reeled off a set
of spatial coordinates committed to his memory and watched in amusement as the psyker’s expression became one of shock. ‘There?’ she asked. ‘But that is beyond the lines of

  It is for his ears?’

  Mendacs returned her nod. ‘The Warmaster, yes, after a fashion.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘Send exactly this, no different. Seven words.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, glowering.

  ‘Mission complete. Proceeding to next target. Mendacs.’

  Leon wasn’t certain what would happen next.

  He had never been this close to a psyker before, never even seen one in the flesh; for blight’s sake, he had never even been off the surface of his home world before this day, and now he crouched, trying to merge with the shadows out in the corridor beyond the astropath’s quarters.

  Awaking with a start as the cargo train came to a halt at the transfer station, the youth had been transfixed by fear, sickened almost to the point of vomiting. Everything felt strange, the pull of gravity on him unusually light, the illuminators in the ceiling too bright, the air cold and artificial-tasting.

  He hid inside the pod, afraid that Mendacs would come to find him, waiting until the remembrancer’s footsteps died away. When he recovered a scrap of his bravery, Leon dared to step out and follow the man on as best he could. Through trial and error, he had found his way here – but not before happening on a viewing port that presented to him the curve of his planet and the infinite void that surrounded it.

  Leon looked into the blackness and had never been so terrified in all his life. He saw the dark and the fragile mass of Virger-Mos II, and suddenly realised that his father had been right all along. The universe beyond the home they knew was a vast and uncaring space; one glimpse of this awesome sight showed the truth of those words.

  He dared to look up from his cover as Mendacs spoke his own name, holding the slim pistol in his hand on the telepath. The woman did something strange, and the air around him seemed to ripple and flex like a lens of oil. A sharp, greasy taint flowed through the chamber, prickling his skin. Leon felt a spider web touch all over his body and he almost cried out. It was the warp. The gossamer edges of it bleeding out from the astropath as she sent the signal.