What is this?' I asked, dragging the sheets back.
'Streetfight killers… witnesses said they came in here/ said the arbites sergeant, advancing towards the bed.
'Me, I been here all night. Me and my friends/
They gonna vouch for you, twist?' asked the sergeant, raising his weapon.
Wass goin' on? Too much light!' said Bequin, emerging from the dirty linen on the bed. Somehow she had removed her dress beneath the sheets. Clad in brief underwear, she slithered on top of me.
'Wass you doin'? Stoppin' a girl makin' her way? Shame on you!'
The sergeant ran his flashlight beam up and down the length of her body as it clung to me. I smiled the inane smile of the lucky or well-oiled.
He snapped the light off. 'Sorry to interrupt you, miss/ The door closed and the arbites thumped away.
I looked down at Bequin with a wink. 'Good improvisation/1 said.
She leapt off me and grabbed her clothes. 'Don't get any funny ideas, Gregor!'
I'd had funny ideas about her for years, truth be told. She was beautiful and sublimely sexy. But she was also an untouchable. It hurt me to be close to her, physically hurt.
I hate that fact. I feel a lot for Bequin and I long to be with her, but it was never going to happen. Never, ever.
That's one of the truly great sadnesses of my life.
And hers too, I hope, in my more self-aggrandising moments.
I lay in bed and watched her drag on her dress again, and I felt the pang of desire.
But there was no way. No way in the galaxy.
She was untouchable. I was a psyker.
That way pain and madness lay.
TEN
Ruminations on Lyko.
The Chew-after.
The highest bidder.
Tumultuous sap-storms hammered the twist-town in the pre-dawn, blanketing the sky with swirling vapours and shaking the tiles and shutters with the gross weight of their heavy pelting goop. Thunder rolled. In the aftermath, veils of mist swathed the countryside, and the stillness was alive with gurgling and dripping and the swarming scurry of sap-lice and storm-bugs.
Nayl went out early with Aemos and bought paper pails of warm food from the twist-town commissary just down the street, which was already serving the work lines forming for the shift change in the mills. By the time they returned, we had been joined by Inshabel and Husmaan, who had slept through the night's altercation with the arbites in a shared room down the hall.
I'd yet to formally notify the ordo that Inshabel had joined my band, but he was now very much part of it. I felt he had the right to be here on this mission, for Roban's sake, and for his own. He had brought the news of Esarhaddon to me, directly and selflessly. Few of my team yet referred to him by his rank – it would be a long while until anyone eclipsed the memory of Interrogator Ravenor – but he had meshed well, with his bright mind and healthy, caustic wit. He was already providing me with more solid service than Alain von Baigg had ever managed.
Duj Husmaan had been a skin-hunter on his homeworld of Windhover when Harlon Nayl had first met him. That was back in Nayl's
bounty-chasing days, before he'd joined my cause. I'd recruited Husmaan eight years before on Nayl's recommendation, and he'd proved to be a resourceful, if superstitious, warrior with a great sense for pathfinding. Nayl had personally selected him from the individuals in my retinue as muscle for this venture, and I had no quibble with the choice.
Husmaan was a slender man of medium height with coppery skin and white, sun-scorched hair and goatee. Here on Eechan, like all of us, he'd drabbed down his clothing to ragged black twist robes. He ignored the bundle of disposable wooden forks that Aemos had brought back from the commissary and started to eat the hot food from his paper pail with his fingers.
I picked at my own food idly, wondering how close we were to Lyko.
Lyko had been a fool and had damned himself. The damaging revelation that it hadn't been Esarhaddon who had been torched on the lawns of the Lange palace could have been circumvented if Lyko had kept his head. He could have claimed it a mistake, another example of the heretic psyker's treachery.
