Divination - John French Read online

  ‘You think that will work?’

  ‘As a beginning. Does he still have that one-eyed felid that follows him through the house?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Have it removed and ended. That is enough on Cleander. If we talk more of him we will have overspent on breath. To the next point. Viola – her tutoring and primary conditioning are progressing well…’

  The voices stopped coming from the Decagogue’s mouth. The man licked his lips. His tongue was blue.

  ‘You ran with tears on your cheeks,’ said the man. ‘They gave you the skull of the animal who had been your companion, and you had to keep it in sight of your bed. It stayed there until after your parents’ death. You took it and buried it with their ashes.’

  Cleander felt pain in his hands, and looked down. They were clenched shut, blood visible between the knuckles.

  ‘Every good pet deserves favour,’ he said, making his shoulders shrug.

  The Decagogue smiled, and then his head tilted back above his lower jaw so that his mouth was open again.

  ‘It’s not so bad, little brother,’ said another voice, female, almost like his mother’s, almost like his own – Cristina, his sister, first in line, the heir to all he would never have.

  ‘The Imperial Navy… oubliette of every unwanted bit of family dross since we got the pissing charter,’ said his own voice, younger, much younger but still his. ‘You get a ship, lots in fact, and you don’t have to spend half a decade being humiliated in some mouldering training skiff.’

  ‘Trust me – being the designated heir is not anything you want.’

  ‘No?’ his voice asked.

  ‘No.’ A silence spread through the grey-draped chamber, and then his eldest sister’s voice again. ‘Look, try to not antagonise mother and father, all right.’

  ‘Antagonise? I wouldn’t know how.’

  ‘I am serious, Cleander. This family, it’s…’

  ‘I know,’ said his voice, suddenly flat.

  ‘I know you do, little brother,’ said her voice. ‘That’s why I am saying be careful. It only gets worse from here, not better.’

  The Decagogue closed his mouth. There were drops of blood on his lips. The tip of his tongue licked them away.

  ‘Cristina,’ he said. ‘Your elder sister, whatever happened to her?’

  ‘You know,’ said Cleander. ‘If the voices in your skull have whispered this much, you know the rest just as well as I do, and I have the advantage of having actually been there.’

  ‘I do know,’ said the Decagogue. ‘I hear all the secrets of your heart. Listen…’

  ‘Duchess von Castellan will see you now,’ said the voice of Casulas, and the memory of the major-domo unfolded in Cleander’s mind like a sheet of crumpled paper smoothed out on a table. He saw the door to his mother’s personal office. He had gone in, through the doors and into a room hung with pictures with proud faces, hard eyes watching him as he had walked across the carpet. She had stood behind the expanse of blackwood that was her desk, layers of data-rich holo-projections hanging in the air around her. Her eyes moved between each of the displays, but not to him. He stopped in front of the desk. Still she had not moved. He had taken a silver case from the breast pocket of his jacket, removed a lho stick, lit it and inhaled.

  ‘Vile,’ said his mother’s voice from the Decagogue’s throat.

  He had exhaled. The long plume of smoke drifted through the holo light.

  ‘I was actually thinking that you looked quite well,’ said a voice that had been his.

  She had shut off the holo-light, and watched him, her thin, beautiful face, with skin too taut, and eyes of flint.

  ‘Your commission at the Naval academy at Bakka has been issued,’ said his mother’s voice.

  ‘So I hear. I am sure they can’t wait.’

  ‘You will begin your voyage there in five hours.’

  ‘Seems a little hasty, don’t you think? After all, aren’t most pleasures enhanced by being delayed.’

  ‘You are a member of this family – you understand.’

  ‘Am I? How nice to have it confirmed. Would you mind putting it in writing, Duchess von Castellan?’

  ‘You will not shame us.’ Her voice was low now, dangerous. ‘You will not shame this house. You will not shame me.’

  He had shrugged, he remembered, the gesture a product of the years of careful selection from actions that would not demand punishment. There were many punishments, he had learned, some overt, most subtle. The subtler the worse. Cruelty had become the landscape he had danced through from waking to sleeping as he grew.

  ‘Let me think about it,’ he said.

  And then, faster than he would have thought she could move, his mother had come around the desk and was in front of him, eyes alight, face hard.

  ‘I know you,’ hissed her voice, and her face had been so close that he could smell the cinnamon scent of stim elixir on her breath. He had been taller than her, then, taller and growing heavier with muscle, a man not a boy. But still, he had recoiled. ‘For all that I wish I did not, I know you, boy. The air you breathe is mine. The blood in your veins was mine. The skull under your skin I made. Your words I gave you. And I know that all there is to you is rot, the dregs of what our line can produce. Swagger and grin all you like, but never forget that I hold what little happiness you have in my grasp.’

  And she had taken the burning lho stick from his lips, put it to her own mouth and inhaled so that the tip glowed red.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ said her voice.

  ‘No…’ said a voice that was no longer strong and swaggering, but small, crumpled.

  ‘Your. Hand.’

  And he had held up his hand to her.

  In the grey-white room facing the man with dark eyes, Cleander felt his fingers grip the wooden arms of the chair.

  ‘Did you feel sorrow when your parents were killed?’ asked the Decagogue.

  ‘I wept enough to fill an ocean.’

  ‘You drank enough to send you into a near coma.’

  ‘It’s what they would have wanted,’ he said with a smile.

  The Decagogue was still for a moment then his lips started to move.

  ‘The cyber-tigers and chase-hounds they were using on the hunt were reprogrammed,’ said Viola’s voice. ‘A data-jinn in their governor devices. We will petition the tech-priests to share with us what they find, but it was subtle. Might have been there for years, just waiting for activation.’

  ‘And Cristina?’ said his own voice,

  ‘We think she managed to shoot five of the creatures before they brought her down.’

  ‘Was it quick?’

  ‘No,’ said Viola. ‘It was not. The hunting pack, they… they crippled them and then… The vox comms had been sabotaged too. Up there in the game ranges there was no one to hear them.’

  ‘I want to know who it was, Vi,’ said his voice, and he could hear the soft anger in it, barely held beneath the surface.

  ‘I am working on it, but–’

  ‘Once they have been found I want whoever it was destroyed, you understand? Messily and publicly. Cost no object.’

  ‘We shouldn’t do–’

  ‘I am giving a command. As head of the dynasty now, I am ordering it done. That’s how it works, doesn’t it?’

  A pause now, in the silence between him and the Decagogue, a silence that was an echo of that moment as Viola had looked at him and then bowed her head.

  ‘As you say, so it shall be done,’ said her voice, and in his memory he saw her turn away to the doors out of the room that had been his mother’s office.

  ‘It’s not for them,’ said his voice, and he remembered that those words had held her at the door. ‘It’s for her, for Cristina. Everyone will think it was me that did this. But I…’

 
‘I know,’ said Viola’s voice.

  Cleander let out a long breath, and closed his remaining eye for a second.

  ‘You ran from that moment,’ said the Decagogue. ‘You got everything that had been denied you and you ran into the throat of anything that could hide yourself from yourself. We know. We walked with you while you danced through the stars with a murderer’s blade in your grip. We held your hand as you raised the cup to your lips and hoped that it would tip you over into nothing. We were in the spin of the wheel and the gleam of gold and stars. We know you and we want you to be whole. We want you to be free. And we know that you want all that we can give you.’

  Red pearls of blood formed on the man’s lips. Frost glittered around the edges of his eye sockets. And as the Decagogue spoke, the grey room around Cleander began to move. The pale shrouds that looked as though they covered furniture rose up, unfolded, and billowed as though caught in wind. But there was no wind. The shrouds rippled, colours spreading across them: gold, silver, copper, amethyst, mother of pearl, jet. Figures raised their heads from the billowing cloth. Their necks and limbs were long, stretched, skin smooth or finely scaled. Smiles broad. Eyes bright. A throng stood around him, silent yet filling the air with whispers and sobbing and giggles and sighs. They were all looking at Cleander.

  ‘These blessed ones were all like you. Yet look at them now… Look!’

  And he looked, and saw the joy in eyes set in faces of smooth skin, and laughter in the lips pulled back from teeth. He looked around and then back to the Decagogue.

  ‘You know,’ said Cleander, forcing the lightness to his voice even as the old joke and laughter echoed in the hollows behind his eyes. ‘You are passable at the voices, but as an act I think it could do with some polish before you take it on the stage.’

  The Decagogue tilted his head to the side, eyes still not blinking.

  ‘You have been kind enough to tell me such interesting stories,’ continued Cleander. ‘I really must return the favour. You are very keen to talk about me, about all you can do for me, but you haven’t said much about yourselves.’ He tapped his mouth. ‘I can’t do the voices like you can, but then I am a bit of a traditionalist, I suppose. Pen and ink and written record and words in files stamped with the seal of the Inquisition – not quiet secrets whispered from the ether, but good enough.’ He smiled around at the throng.

  ‘I know you, you see. I know all of you. I know all about you. You call yourself a priesthood because that’s what you want to be, and what is wrong with a lie if it brightens the day a little? You were all liars once,’ he flicked a hand at the Decagogue, ‘out there peddling lies to every idiot who would listen to you about how they could be healed. You sold tinctures, and prayer scrolls and cruelty masquerading as medicine. But that was not enough, and so you began to find other uses for the pilgrims you found – spiteful, vicious uses. And then something heard you, something that listens to secrets from just out of sight, heard and decided to give you a little of what you craved. Power, truth from which to make better lies, and now you really did have the means to change lives. People began to seek you out – empty people, broken people – and you made them like you… a priesthood of lies and secret sins that feeds on this city like a tick on a dog’s rump. And those that didn’t make it that far, well, you needed them for other things.

  ‘I know about the rooms, you see, the rooms where you take the ones that find you and don’t become like you. I know about the room of red, and the room of black, and the room of white. I know about the hidden feasts. I know about the eaters, and the singers, and those soft things that just sleep and feed. I know what becoming one of you means without needing to see it.’

  The glittering figures were closer now, though he had not seen them move. The air was getting colder as he talked.

  ‘Then someone like me comes along, a threat, real threat, but with so much that you want, power, wealth, friends in high places and low ones. You are greedy. No real blaming you for that – it’s your nature at this point. And you think how splendid it would be to actually turn the person sent to destroy you into one of you. After all,’ he drawled with a grin that showed his own teeth, ‘I am just like you, so in need of something to make my life seem whole, so hollowed out by life. And so you think, maybe it’s possible.

  ‘And you know what? You are right.’ He gave a nod to the Decagogue. ‘I am perfect for you. I have killed, and drunk, and dived into every excess I could find at one point or another. And it is never enough, never even close enough. So I can’t say that I don’t understand why you think that you could turn this around. But…’

  The smile faded from Cleander’s face. The glittering throng of priests seemed very close now, and some of that glitter at the edge of sight was sharp. His hand went to his eyepatch and moved it aside. The blind pale sphere in the socket looked out at the throng as they paused for a moment, caught between confusion and action.

  ‘But you don’t understand something that you really, really should.’ And he pulled the eyeball out. ‘And you really should check things more carefully.’

  He squeezed the sphere of pale flesh, and the ball of circuitry and exotic machinery sheathed inside pushed out, like a pip from a soft fruit. A tiny red light flickered on and off.

  A shout rose into a shriek. Cleander was up and out of the chair. The glittering throng surged forwards. Cleander threw the false eye. The Decagogue was on his feet, hand rising. White frost and black smoke poured from his mouth. A priest in a robe of golden scales reached for Cleander, blades for fingers, spikes for a grin. And Cleander grabbed the man, embracing him close.

  The thrown eye detonated. Light shrieked through the chamber, blinding, energy scything through limbs and torsos, blood flashing to ash. The blast ripped through the priest Cleander clutched to him and sent them both blasting backwards. The man died with a shriek on his lips, but Cleander was already throwing the remains of the corpse aside and rising.

  Another came at him, silk and skin burning. Cleander kicked the chair into the priest, who ducked back, bangles of jade and amethyst rattling. Cleander surged forwards, ramming the reeling figure as his arms locked around the priest’s head and twisted. The figure flipped over, vertebrae snapping before it slammed into the floor, twitching.

  Another two were coming at Cleander. He stamped down on the one twitching on the floor then spun back, scooping up the wooden chair as he moved and crashing it into the first of the pair. The wood shattered. The first priest fell back into its comrade. Cleander had a splintered spar in his hand. The priest began to rise. The sharp tip of wood stabbed down, once, twice, again. And he was on to the next and the next: a knife twisted from a hand and slammed into a throat, the snap of a neck breaking, the blood from a head slammed down into the ground. All just passing moments, all just a world passing by, warm and fast and screaming. Blood scattered up to paint his face as fire filled the room, and he felt the void within him open and reach out through his hands.

  And he was running through the old manse again, a boy alone in a house full of people.

  Then a man sitting in the chair in his mother’s office, the holo-screens and data machines powered down, the factotums dismissed, and the silence settling over him as he began to light a lho stick and found that tears were rolling down his cheeks.

  Then an older man sitting opposite Covenant, just the two of them.

  ‘I have no choice, really,’ he had said.

  ‘There is always a choice,’ Covenant had said.

  The Decagogue was not coming forwards but standing, trembling mouth flapping, fragments of words spoken in other voices tumbling out.

  ‘Vile…’

  ‘There is nothing good in him…’

  ‘A waste…’

  ‘He’s useful, but nothing more…’

  ‘Give me your hand…’

  Multicoloured images formed and vanished around the D
ecagogue’s head. Blood was running down the man’s chin. His smooth face was cracking, crumbling, age flowing back into the skin and bone as the gifts granted to him evaporated. Cleander felt ghosts of sensation rise in him as he stepped closer. The kiss of lips, the taste of honey and sweet milk, the boom of countless voices all crying out his name, all falling, all fading. Fire had caught in the wood of the walls and floor. Some of the gaudy figures on the floor were still twitching. Most were still, blood pooling from them, dead hands crooked. Cleander stopped, just in reach of the Decagogue. The man was a spindle-limbed thing now, cracked paper-thin skin hanging from bones. He raised a hand, a dagger gleaming in twisted fingers. Cleander smiled, and kicked the false priest’s legs out, so that the man tumbled to the floor.

  The Decagogue snarled up at him, black tongue splitting.

  ‘Better if he had died at birth…’

  Cleander knelt down.

  ‘They killed me, little brother… The hounds, their teeth… I was alive and awake for it all. I screamed but no one came…’

  He took the dagger from the Decagogue’s fingers.

  The man began to scream, the voice of his eldest sister blending with the howl of the creature that had been his companion as a child.

  ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ said Cleander, looking down into the eyes of the Decagogue. ‘I don’t care. Down at the heart of everything, this life is one thing. Not hope, not pleasure, not power. It took me a long time to see it, a long time and a lot of hiding from it, but I got there in the end. There is nothing that can save us and nothing that cares. You can offer me all you like, but all of it is worth nothing. There is nothing, just the void that we call life and perhaps the sound of the universe laughing.’

  The Decagogue’s eyes were glittering, blood crusting and freezing at their edges.

  ‘Your soul is ours, Cleander von Castellan… ours.’

  ‘You know what I find is best?’ said Cleander, looking at the dagger, a small smile on his lips. ‘To laugh along.’

  He stabbed the dagger down.

  After a moment he stood and wiped his hand across his face, and then frowned. Both were sticky with blood. None of it was his. He coughed. Smoke was beginning to fill the room. The transmitter in the micro-grenade had probably triggered as intended. Dannica, Josef and the rest would be coming. Probably. All Cleander had needed to do was reach the Decagogue, confirm it was him, and remove him. He had done that. There was going to be a lot of clearing up, a lot of killing, a little mercy, and quite a lot of burning, he had no doubt. His part was done, though. For now.