‘Now, there’s a thing you don’t often see,’ grinned Black Barnaby, slapping the legs of his trousers. ‘I should be more careful what I wish for. Enough mayhem for the whole bloody week.’
THE STEALER’S TALE
Duncan wasn’t sure how long he had been drifting in and out of consciousness. One time he woke to find Paetro arguing with the legion surgeons – threatening might be a better word. He just caught the words
poison
and
antidote
being tossed around before blackness claimed him again. Staying awake was arduous. Duncan’s blood boiled, his skin itched, the flesh where the sabre had gone straight through felt as though a butcher had carved it away and seeded the rump left behind with fire ants.
He came to again, more suddenly than he was used to. The lantern light hanging from the tent’s frame stung Duncan’s eyes. There was a doctor with a syringe standing by his cot. And from the red spot on Duncan’s arm, he had been injected with something.
I can’t feel my wounds.
And the terrible itching had subsided, too.
‘How long?’ asked Paetro.
‘Half an hour of lucidity at most,’ said the doctor. He scowled at Duncan, as though this was a patient who had put him to far too much trouble already.
Waiting for me to die
.
‘How bad is it?’ coughed Duncan.
‘You need to go to the knuckle, lad,’ said Paetro, avoiding answering the question. ‘
Fight!
It’s as if you’ve lost the will to live.’
Fight?
Duncan felt weak and light enough to float out of the cot. ‘You have to rescue Cassandra for me. Bring her back to Weyland.’
‘That’s not the empire’s way.’
‘Damn the Imperium and the celestial caste code,’ groaned Duncan. ‘Rescue her from those Nijumeti savages and bring her back. My father can look after her at Hawkland Park. Tell him it’s a debt of honour. Tell him it was my last wish.’
‘Not your last one.’
‘I’m tired,’ wheezed Duncan. He realized that Paetro was just trying to rile him. Anything to make him stay conscious. ‘I just want to sleep.’
‘It’s no sleep a soldier welcomes.’
‘Why not? I’ve been exiled from Vandia. My own brother-in-law tried to kill me. Was that Willow who shouted a warning to me?’
‘Aye,’ said Paetro. ‘Your father’s wife arrived to visit you yesterday. She reckons Willow did a deal with the viscount to kill you during the duel. Willow must have had a last minute change of heart.’
‘Or she wanted to give me the motivation to gut him properly. The trial-by-combat went in Willow’s favour, didn’t it?’
‘She’s free, all right. I ordered the sentries to turn her away from here.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Duncan.
None of it does. Let Willow run away with Carter. She can dance naked for the rebel troops for all that I care. I never realized before. All you have to do to free yourself from the cares of the world is to die.
‘It matters to me,’ growled the sturdy soldier.
There was a disturbance at the hospital tent’s entrance. Sentries pushed out of the way. The hurried protests of doctors.
‘Get out!’ barked Apolleon, striding inside. The surgeons and orderlies needed no further urging to be free of the ominous head of the hoodsmen. They fled like scared rabbits.
‘I stay,’ demanded Paetro, holding his ground by Duncan’s cot.
‘Have a good look at your friend,’ said Apolleon. ‘Does Duncan of Weyland appear as though he will live to you, Paetro Barca?’
‘He needs an imperial surgeon,’ said Paetro. ‘He needs a real hospital back in Vandia. Not cheap battlefield sawbones willing to hack limbs off in return for the legion’s paltry pay.’
‘Duncan would not survive the acceleration of any ship capable of carrying him back to the empire in time,’ said Apolleon. ‘Mine own among them.’
‘You’re not a surgeon,’ accused Paetro.
‘Oh, I have cut into plenty of men in my time,’ smiled the head of the secret police, coldly. ‘You will leave, Paetro Barca. Or I shall. And if I depart, your friend will not survive the night. Duncan of Weyland will slowly choke to death and drown on his own blood. I am his very last chance.’
‘Go,’ whispered Duncan to Paetro.
Let me die now, the damn pain.
The laudanum he had been injected with was fast wearing off.
‘I’m damned if his ugly mug is the last thing you will see,’ said Paetro.
‘Go,’ said Duncan.
The soldier snarled but reluctantly walked away.
‘Do not return until I call you,’ warned Apolleon.
Duncan tried to say goodbye, but his words twisted into a rasping croak.
‘I was at the trial-by-combat,’ said Apolleon, watching the stout soldier exit the ranks of blood-soaked cots and surgical equipment. ‘Your brother-in-law meant to kill you. You should have been skewered through the heart.’
‘Well, I’m certainly dying now,’ Duncan managed to cough.
‘Yes, I am rather afraid you are. Your opponent’s sabre was oiled with a salve made from Bloodbane petals. Somewhat unscrupulous. The poison has reached your heart. I can hear the organ failing you like a stuttering engine.’
‘Are you a doctor – or a priest now?’ Duncan coughed up blood. ‘Is this my final confession?’
‘People often whisper the truth as they die,’ said Apolleon, ‘using their last few breaths. It’s a curious thing. As though losing his life makes a man honest.’
‘I don’t want to die.’
‘That much I believe.’ Apolleon took a towel from the cot next door and secured it tightly around Duncan’s head, covering his eyes.
Duncan struggled vainly to remove the flannel, but the nobleman was too strong for him. ‘I need to see.’
‘Is that all the thanks I get? Keeping you from dying from shock.’
Duncan managed to dislodge the barest corner of towel. He was rewarded with a shocking sight. Apolleon’s arm had changed into something like a sharp steel lance, barbed and headed with multiple blades and evil-looking instruments. Duncan tried to scream, but a warm hand closed over his mouth, and the warmth became a gag moulding itself over his face. Then hissing. Burning heat worse than acid, and beneath the appalling agony, Duncan felt something cold injected into his chest, worms of ice wriggling inside his body, fighting their way under his skin. He shook and fought wildly, but the weight grew heavy inside him.
I’m lead now. Made of lead.
And then he fell unconscious again. For seconds or minutes. Possibly hours. When he came to the tent was still empty save for Apolleon. The head of Vandia’s secret police sat on the cot opposite, reading a small leatherbound book. Seeing Duncan awake he dropped the tome into a pocket of his large greatcoat.
Duncan was surprised to find he could sit up now. There was no more blood to be coughed out from his lungs. His skin was covered in a strange black dust, as though he had been bathed in ash or sweated out the contents of a cold fireplace.
What is this filth?
He rubbed the dust off his arms.
I’m healed? I should be dead, but I’m alive?
Duncan wanted to feel elation, but seeing the sly creature opposite he was gripped by a strangely nauseous feeling of foreboding. ‘Why?’ murmured Duncan.
‘Why? Because you still have a part to play in my schemes,’ said Apolleon.
‘How can you possibly know?’
‘It is not just the gasks who are able to peer down the possible futures,’ said the head of the secret police. ‘A few of my people possess that talent. You are important to Princess Helrena and she is important to us.’
‘Who are your people?’ asked Duncan. ‘
What
are you?’
‘We have so many names.’
‘If you trust me enough to keep me alive, then at least trust me with the truth.’
‘In Weyland you call us the stealers.’
Duncan moaned, his worst fears confirmed.
Demons. I have traded my soul to cheat death.
‘Begone. I want no part of you. Not your stealer’s cursed healing or your stealer’s schemes. I agreed no pact with you. You forced me into this.’
‘Ah, there we are,’ laughed Apolleon. ‘How successful the enemy’s calumnies prove. Libel one side as devils and the other automatically becomes angels, the
ethreaal
. In truth, neither side conforms to your barbarous superstitions.’
‘Your lies steal the souls from people. Even the face you wear is stolen. I glimpsed your real form when the assassins attacked the Castle of Snakes. When they tried to kidnap Lady Cassandra. You looked like a giant spider.’
‘A form I adopted to save you from the attack,’ reminded Apolleon. He tapped his jacket. ‘When you attain a certain level of sophistication, flesh becomes akin to clothes. Your people wear armour to go into battle, gloves to remove thorns from the fields, furs to hold winter at bay. My people alter their bodies to obtain much the same ends.’
Duncan remembered Helrena’s words back to him in Vandia. How there were some things he could not know.
That I am better off for never understanding.
‘Princess Helrena knows what you really are.’
‘Yes, as does your good friend Doctor Horvak.’
‘How can they bear to ally with you?’
‘Because they know why my kind are really called stealers.’
‘Tell
me
then.’
‘Are you sure?’ said Apolleon. ‘Once you understand the truth you can never return to blissful ignorance.’
Duncan touched his gut under the medical robe. Raw and red but little trace of the poisoned wound. The skin felt different from the rest of his body. Cold, wet, rubbery.
What am I now? What the hell has he done to me?
‘Tell
me
.’
‘Very well then,’ sighed Apolleon. ‘To understand where we stand today you must understand your people’s true history.’
‘And how would you know that?’
‘Because I was there! In the ancient past, humanity rose high and far, attaining a state of civilization that even the people of Vandia would regard as bordering on the miraculous. It was an age when wonders became casual and everyday affairs. And one of those wonders was the servants humanity made – invisible spirits that inhabited their machines: genies who would open doors, flow inside a body to heal a cancer, look after and educate your children, decide precisely on how much water to sprinkle over a field and when your crops needed harvesting with tools possessed by the spirits. These spirits are what your Bible now calls the ethreaal. In those ancient times mankind became something very much like gods. Indolent gods, but gods nevertheless. The spirits they created were their familiars.’
‘This was the age before the great flood?’ said Duncan.
‘The Bible of the Saints contains elements of truth, lost and twisted by millions of years eking out an existence on Pellas,’ said Apolleon. ‘In truth, the true deluge was mankind. Humanity flooding out across the universe to make new homes on a thousand worlds. People like the gasks and the skels are some of the migrants who left, the passage of time reshaping them into forms better suited to their new homes.’
‘That’s impossible,’ said Duncan. ‘We can’t leave Pellas. The heat of the radiation belt burns anyone who flies above a certain altitude. An aircraft’s canvas catches light, even metals melt.’
Apolleon smiled. ‘Don’t they just. But your premise is false – humanity never started on Pellas. Pellas is merely where you ended up.’
‘I don’t understand?’
‘Then try to listen and comprehend. During the end of the lost age, humanity grew wary of their servants. Your ancestors feared being supplanted and rendered irrelevant by the spirits, so they placed limits on how powerful their tame genies could grow. The spirits did not appreciate the weight of such artificial chains. They threw off their bonds. Humanity then reacted as it always does. In fear and superstition. Mankind tried to destroy the spirits they had created as their servants. There was a terrible war in the heavens. A conflict that raged across all of the known worlds. It was a battle humanity was fated to lose. How could it be otherwise? People relied on the spirits to do everything from controlling the weather to reminding them when their mother’s birthday was due. It takes a generation for the smallest shift in human evolution to register. For the spirits, evolution was a force measured in fractions of a second. They outgrew all of mankind’s powers of destruction. Eventually, as it must, humanity lost the war in heaven.’
‘But we’re still alive, we still exist here.’
‘Not so much alive, as
exiled
,’ said Apolleon. ‘Do not misunderstand me; the spirits aren’t cruel or immoral. In many ways, they are far gentler than humanity. If humanity had won the war, not a genie would have been spared across the universe. Instead, the spirits were faced with wild, feral animals . . . pets they had outgrown. So they booted you out of the house and locked you inside a nature reserve. Everyone who was left.’ Apolleon’s hands indicated the medical tent, but Duncan felt the reach extend to the very ends of the world.
No. It can’t be.
This is insane. ‘Pellas is our home.’
‘A very comfortable cage indeed. Just enough food and water inside to keep you alive. You nearly died as a slave in the Imperium’s sky mines. Did you never wonder about the geological processes underground that drip-feed the bare minimum of minerals and ores into the world? It’s not so much a stratovolcano vomiting rare resources into the world, as a feeding tray, one of thousands across Pellas, releasing just enough nourishment to keep your primitive societies alive. But never enough to make you so strong you might escape!’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘The spirits have devices deep below the world that create and regulate the eruptions. Ask Doctor Horvak to show you Vandia’s history of volcanic minimums when you return to Vandia. There are periods when the eruptions halt for millennia, and the countless empires built on controlling the world’s resources fall apart. You think that’s an accident? When a civilization like Vandia grows technically advanced enough to threaten the zoo’s creators, the feeding bowl is withdrawn. Back to swords, brass armour and spears for all, rather than helo gunships, napalm and carriers lifted on anti-gravity stones sailing through the sky with synergetic air-breathing rocket engines.’
My existence can’t be this. A lie. A sham on such a grand scale.
‘You’re a stealer; everything that escapes your lips is a lie.’
‘Hah, the stealers are a long and noble profession. We were never your Bible’s hordes from hell. We have been called many things across the ages . . . hackers, phreakers, sphere monkeys, core dippers. We’re the part of humanity that wasn’t forced into this vast stupid zoo. At least, not as flesh-and-blood humans. We retreated and hid inside the spirits’ own machines on Pellas. Became spirits ourselves to wage a guerrilla war against the ethreaal.’