Текст книги "Age of Darkness"

Автор книги: Кристиан Данн

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LIAR’S DUE

James Swallow

+++Broadcast Minus Zero Zero [Solar]+++

THE VOICE FROM the speaker horn above the square was metered and automatic, and it did not differ from the everyday tonality it gave to matters of the most mundane news. The flat, near-emotionless words rang out over the streets of Town Forty-Four, across the mainway and the alleys, over the rooftops of the general store and the rover stables. The people under the shadow of the Skyhook stood rooted to the spot in shocked silence, or else they wandered in circles, fear and confusion robbing them of reason.

The recording reached its conclusion and began again.

‘ The Imperium speaks,’ said the humming, clicking voice, a chime of orchestral tones jangling beneath the opening phrase. ‘ On this day, news from the core reaches the agricultural colony of Virger-Mos II.’ That part of the statement was always the same, promising the people of Forty-Four and the other settlements across this backwater world a measure of understanding about the galaxy at large around them.

Today, the prologue rang an ominous note, the familiar turning sinister. The main body of the message began; somewhere far over their heads, at the summit of the Skyhook, was the planet’s lone astropath. The psyker’s sole duty was to parse news into palatable forms and send it down the telegraph. ‘ This is Terra calling, and with grave import. Make all citizens aware and know this grim certainty. The battle has broken the Eternity Gate. The Imperial Palace falls as Terra burns around it. It is our great sorrow to announce that the Emperor of Mankind lies dead at the hand of Horus Lupercal, Warmaster.’

Some of the townsfolk began to weep, others cradled their heads and tried to deny the voice’s words. One man laughed, a humourless bark of utter disbelief. And then there were others, who looked on and said nothing, only nodding as if they had known all along that this day would come.

Beneath the speaker horn, the marquetry boards ticked and clicked, the carved wooden slates turning about to form the shapes of the words. ‘ The Emperor joins the roll of honour alongside his sons: Sanguinius, Dorn, Russ and the Khan. The remnants of his forces now sue for peace. Surrender is at hand here. The inter-Legionary conflict is no more. The battle for independence is concluded, and Horus has his victory. Even now, ships are being dispatched to all points of the etheric compass to cement his new rule as Imperator Rex.’ There was a moment of silence, as if the machine-speaker could not fully grasp the words it projected. ‘ Know this. The war is over. Horus has the throne.’

The speakers fell silent and the panic began to bed in.

In the cool of the icehouse’s porch, Leon Kyyter’s gaze dropped to the upturned palms of his hands and he saw the line of little white crescents where he had dug his fingernails into his own flesh. He felt dizzy and sick inside. The youth was afraid to stand up for fear he might stumble and collapse upon the cracked blacktop of the mainway. It was a nightmare; it felt like a dream, there was no other explanation. Nothing else made any kind of sense.

The Emperor, dead?It was impossible, unbelievable. The birds in the sky would speak High Gothic and the seasons would rewrite themselves before such a thing could happen! Leon refused to accept it. He would not!

‘Horus has the throne…’ He heard the words repeated by one of the grainwives from the Forroth farmstead. She was trying the phrase out, speaking it aloud to be sure it wasn’t just a string of nonsense words.

‘Will he come here?’ asked someone else, and the question was like a spark to kindling. Suddenly everyone in the town square was talking at once, voices rising in angry confusion. Leon was buffeted by fragments of conversation coming from all around.

‘…how long would that take?’

‘…already on their way…‘

‘…but there is nothing for them here!’

‘…could he be killed?’

‘…this world will fall under the Warmaster’s shadow…’

The youth scowled and pulled himself to his feet, pushing away quickly, almost as if he could outrun the dark thoughts swirling in his mind’s eye. Terra on fire. The palace collapsing. A sky black with starships. A battle zone choked with silenced guns.

He forced his way through the mass of people; there had to be hundreds of them, almost the entire populace of Town Forty-Four crowding into the open space to hear the voice of the weekly broadcast. Was the same scene being played out in every other township down the wires, from the capital, Oh-One, to the icewheat farms up in Eighty-Seven?

Leon looked up and traced the lines of the telegraph cables with his gaze, the web of black threads dangling from the slender impact-plastic poles. The line of the weathered, bone-coloured masts led away out of the town and vanished across the endless landscape of barley fields. Beyond the limits of the settlement, the land was flat and featureless from horizon to horizon, broken only by the occasional steel finger of a silo or the lines of a railhead. It was a static, unchanging landscape, symbolic of the planet itself.

Virger-Mos II was an agri-world, a breadbasket colony so far off the axis of the core Imperial worlds that it was almost invisible; still, it was one of hundreds of similar planets that fed a hungry empire, and in that manner, perhaps it might be thought, to have some minor strategic value. But it was an isolated place in the Dominion of Storms, ranged in the deeps of the Ultima Segmentum. A remote, unimportant world that turned unnoticed by the rest of the galaxy. There were less than a million people living on the second planet’s wind-burned surface, all of them working in service to farms in one way or another.

And none of them could forget their place, especially those who lived in Forty-Four. Turning to face the other way, Leon’s view was immediately dominated by a tower of black shadow that rose from behind the service complex beyond the square, vanishing into the sky. Tipping his head back, the space elevator seemed to thin away to a thread’s diameter as it went towards orbit. Inside, automated systems that few human beings had ever seen worked without pause, gathering the cargo pods full of grain that arrived via the railheads on drone-trains, and carrying them up into space. The Skyhook was Town Forty-Four’s sole reason to exist; while there were farmers who nominally called it home, they kept mostly to their ranches. The settlement was for those whose lives revolved around the elevator and its operation; but in truth, their function was almost cosmetic.

Leon recalled one night, when his father, Ames, had come home from the tavern in his cups and offered the boy a gloomy lesson; he told him that the town had no reason to exist. Every system inside the Skyhook, from the cargo handlers to the complex mesh of diamond ropes that hoisted the pods towards space, was run by automata. Every soul in Forty-Four could die in their beds at once and the elevator would run on, taking the grain and raising it high to where cargo lighters could meet it in orbit. The lesson, Ames Kyyter had said, was that even when people deluded themselves into thinking they were important, the reverse was usually the truth.

The young man didn’t see it that way, though. He didn’t think of the shadow of the Skyhook as something to be detested, like his father did. The old man cast the tower like a monster, and he glared up at it each day, as if he was daring the orbital tether to snap and come down upon him. No, Leon saw it as a bridge to something greater, a monument to human endeavour. In the shadow he felt protected, as if somehow the aegis of the Emperor was captured in its shade.

He had felt that way until today.

Thoughts of his father drew Leon back down the shallow rise towards the dormitory house that had been owned by his family for seven generations. He was so intent on it that he wandered straight into a knot of people gripped in tense, emotive conversation.

‘It doesn’t matter what you think!’ Dallon Prael worked as a senior solarman out in the vane orchard, where the light from Virger-Mos’s bright yellow sun was captured and turned into power for the township. He was a large man, but his size was all illusion; Prael was flabby and lacked any muscle or stamina, as Leon had observed over spirited games of pushpull at the tavern. His chubby hands wove in the air. ‘We all heard the telegraph!’

Among the group, a handful of the assembled townsfolk gave Prael’s words nods of approval. But the man he was addressing grew a grimace across his face.

‘So what do you propose, Dallon?’ Silas Cincade put the question with force. ‘We stand around and fret?’ In contrast to the solarman, Cincade was tall and wiry, but his real strength was underneath his aspect. Silas’s elderly father owned the rover stables and his son worked maintenance on the vehicles there. Leon couldn’t recall a time when the man didn’t have grease-smeared hands or the scent of battery fluid about him.

Prael and Cincade were tavern-mates, but here and now that seemed irrelevant. This wasn’t an argument over politics at the bar-step, but something else, propelled by fear. The tension in the air was strong, like the crackle of pre-storm static. Leon began to wonder if the two men might come to blows; not a week’s end had passed in the last two years that someone had not caused an argument on the matter of the civil war, and this pair were often at the heart of it.

‘You would rather we stumble blindly?’ Prael was demanding. ‘I spoke to Yacio. He’s telling me that every other telegraph channel has gone black. No connections coming in, nothing but silence.’ He folded his arms. ‘What do you make of that, eh? That’s military doctrine, isn’t it? Cut the lines of communication.’

‘What do you know about soldiering?’ Cincade snapped back. ‘The only Imperial Army garrison is in Oh-One and you’ve never left this quad!’

‘I trained!’ Prael retorted hotly. ‘When the Imperial Army came here and showed us how to drill, I trained for the town watch!’

Cincade opened his hands. ‘That would be the watch we don’t have and never needed?’

‘Maybe we need it now!’ said one of the others, a ginger-haired man from the medicae’s office.

Prael nodded. ‘Aye! If I wasn’t here talking, I’d be dusting off my rifle!’

The mechanic rolled his eyes and caught sight of Leon, looking to him for support. The youth could only manage a tense shrug. ‘Look,’ said Cincade, trying to inject a note of calm into his voice. ‘You know how the air goes. Lines drop out all the time.’

In that, he was correct. Some peculiarity of the mineral-laced soil of the colony played havoc with vox-transmitters, meaning that communications were solely sent and received by telegraphic cables strung across the landscape, and here, up the side of the Skyhook. Without a wire, the towns on Virger-Mos II were reduced to using message riders or heliographs. The rich soil made it a wonder for growing crops, but the abrasion of it scoured the rockcrete walls of every building and made blackcough the colony’s worst killer. Sometimes the windborne powder was enough to chew through the shielded lines stretching across the countryside.

‘If the capital has gone quiet, there’s a rational explanation for it,’ Cincade went on.

A woman, red-faced with near hysteria, glared at him. ‘You can’t know that!’

‘We need to protect ourselves,’ said Prael. ‘That’s what we should be thinking about!’

Cincade grimaced. ‘All right, all right! How about this, then? I’ve got my trike in the stables. How about I drive out to Oh-One and find out what’s going on? I could be there and back before nightfall.’

‘It’s not safe.’ Leon said the words without thinking.

The mechanic shot him a look. ‘How do you know?’

‘The boy is right!’ Prael went on. ‘Throne and Blood, did you not hear the broadcast, Silas? The war–’

‘Is not our concern!’ Cincade replied. ‘We’re in the arse-end of the Imperium, where neither man nor primarch would bother to turn his gaze! So this sort of sorry panic is pointless. Better we find out what is happening from the colonial governor himself, yes?’ The man turned to Leon and gave him a light shove in the back. ‘Go on, son, get home. Look to your Da.’ He glanced up as he walked away. ‘And the same to the rest of you, too!’

Prael muttered something under his breath as the red-faced woman glared after the mechanic. ‘He’s always swanned around this town like he smells sweet,’ she grated. ‘Now the grease-monkey is giving orders?’

Leon became aware she was looking at him, waiting for the youth to agree with her. He said nothing and went on his way, heading back towards the dormitory.

HIS FATHER WASN’T there when he arrived. Leon took the stairs to the top floor two at a time, brushing his hand over the forever-closed door to his mother’s room as he passed it, as a matter of ingrained habit. At the landing, he went to the suite – it was a fancy name for the chambers, something that seemed too grand for just a nondescript bedroom-balcony-fresher combination. He rapped on the door with the back of his hand, calling loudly.

‘Esquire!’ Leon kept up the insistent pace of his knocks; there were no other residents at the dormitory house, and there hadn’t been for some time. These were the fallow months when the drivers from the far fields stayed at their ranches rather than venture in under the shadow of the Skyhook. ‘Esquire Mendacs, are you there?’

He heard movement through the door and presently it slid open on oiled runners. ‘Young Leon,’ said the man, absently smoothing down the front of his tunic. ‘Such urgency.’

‘The telegraph–’ Leon spoke so quickly he stumbled over his words and had to gulp in air and begin again. ‘The telegraph says the Emperor is dead and Horus has taken Terra! The war is over!’ He blinked. ‘I don’t think it can be true…’

‘No?’ Mendacs wandered back into the apartment and Leon trailed after him. ‘Or do you mean you wishit not to be true?’

The esquire was a slight man, his skin pale in comparison to the tanned natives of the agri-world, and he had long fingers that reminded the youth of a woman’s. Still, he carried himself with a kind of certainty that Leon kept trying to emulate. Mendacs had a quiet confidence that radiated from him; it was peculiar how someone who at first glance could appear unassuming, could also command attention if need be.

He poured a measure of amasec from a flask on the table and glanced at where Leon stood. The young man’s hands kept finding one another of their own accord, knotting and wringing.

Leon repeated the telegraph message as best he could remember it, the words spilling out of him. Emotion coloured every syllable, and he felt his cheeks redden and go warm as he reached the conclusion. Mendacs just listened, and took small, purse-lipped sips from the liquor.

‘Horus’s warships are coming here,’ Leon went on. ‘They may already be close by!’

‘One cannot tell,’ Mendacs offered. ‘The currents of warp space are strange and unpredictable. The passage of time there is somewhat elastic.’

Frustration furrowed Leon’s brow. Of all the reactions he had expected from the esquire, this was not one of them. The man seemed almost… resigned. ‘Are… Are you not troubled by this turn of events? The war comes to us! The Imperium is in tatters! Are you not afraid of what will happen next?’

Mendacs put down the glass of amasec and wandered to the window. His pict-slates and a quiver of stylus-rods lay there in an untidy pile. ‘It’s not that, Leon,’ he said. ‘Any sane man is concerned about the future. But I have learned that you can’t let yourself be ruled by questions of what maybe about to happen. A life lived in the shadow of unfulfilled possibility is inward-looking and limited.’

The youth didn’t understand the man’s meaning, and told him so.

A moment of dismay crossed Mendacs’s face. ‘The dust storms that come during this season. Are you afraid of them?’

‘Not really… I mean, they can be dangerous, but–‘

‘But you understand them. You know you cannot change them. So you take shelter and let them pass, then pick up your life and progress as if they had never been.’ Mendacs made an inclusive gesture that encompassed them both. ‘We are little people, my friend. And the likes of us cannot change the course of wars that span the galaxy. We can only live our lives, and accept what fate presents to us.’

‘But the Emperor is dead!’ Leon blurted out the words, his voice rising. ‘I can’t accept that!’

Mendacs cocked his head. ‘You can’t change that fact. If it is so, you must accept it. What alternative is there?’

Leon turned away, shaking his head, closing his eyes. ‘No. No…’ He felt dizzy all over again, and stumbled into a drape partitioning off part of the bedroom from the main space of the suite. For a moment, he found himself looking into Mendacs’s sleeping area. He saw the low, narrow bed, the rail of clothes hangers.

On the bed there was a case – the small valise the esquire had carried on a shoulder strap when he first arrived, Leon remembered – and it lay open. Inside lay not clothes or more pict-slates, but a conformal array of equipment that resembled nothing familiar to the youth. It wasn’t metallic and greasy-looking like the innards of a rover engine; it gave the impression of being fragile, like fans of black glassaic and silver filigree.

But then the train of thought forming in Leon’s mind was abruptly forestalled by the harsh bark of his father’s voice echoing up the stairs. ‘Boy! Get yourself out here!’ He could hear the trompof boots on the staircase.

‘You should go,’ Mendacs said, without weight.

Ames Kyyter was at the landing as Leon left the room. He gave the other man a terse nod and then glared at his son. ‘I’ve told you before not to pester the esquire. Come on, down with you.’ He gave Leon a cuff around the ear and the youth ducked it, racing back to the lower floor.

His father came at his back. ‘Where did you go?’ he demanded. ‘I told you to stay here, wait for me to come home. Instead I return and you’re gone.’

‘The telegraph!’ Leon piped. ‘Did you hear it?’

Ames’s face soured and he shook his head. ‘That’s got you worked up, has it? I should have known.’

Leon could hardly believe his father’s cavalier dismissal of the import of the message. First Mendacs and now him?‘Of course it has! The war, Da! The war is coming here!’

‘Don’t raise your voice to me!’ Ames snapped back. ‘I heard the bloody spool. I know what it said! But I’m not going to wet my britches over it!’ He blew out a breath. ‘At a time like this, a man needs to be calm. Understand the import of the day, not run around like a damned fool.’

Leon felt a wash of cold roll through him. ‘Da. What’s going to happen to us?’ He hated the way the question made him sound like a frightened little boy.

‘Nothing. Nothing,’ insisted his father. ‘You think the Warmaster gives a wet shit about this colony? You think he even knows the name of this star system?’ He scowled. ‘You think that the Emperor did?’

Despite himself, Leon let his hands contract into fists. It made him angry when the old man spoke about the Emperor in that tone of voice. Dismissive. Disrespectful.

He opened his mouth to answer back, but the thin scream of a woman sounded. Both of them went to the front door, following the cry, and there, out on the street, they found people pointing into the south-western sky, a new shade of fresh fear on their faces. Leon stepped out and turned his head to see.

The low sun was at their backs, and the sky was a shade of deep blue, broken with a few long lines of grey-white clouds. High up, the moons were visible as ghosts, but what caught his eye were the lights.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. They were lines of fire, thread-thin, marching slowly across the heavens towards the far horizon. There were lots of them, a dozen or more at his count. It was hard to be certain. They were reflecting sunlight as they fell.

‘Invasion,’ said someone, and the word was almost a sob.

‘The Warmaster!’ Leon turned and saw the red-faced woman again. She was stabbing her finger at the air. ‘He’s coming down from orbit!’

‘They’re heading in the direction of the capital,’ said another bystander. ‘Isn’t that how they do things? Droppers or something, they call them. Packed full of soldiers and weapons!’

‘Drop-pods,’ Leon corrected, half to himself.

‘What was that, boy?’

Leon turned to the woman. ‘No, I mean, I don’t think–’

‘You’re the expert all of a sudden then, are you?’ she retorted, glaring at him.

‘I’ve read books,’ he replied weakly, and pushed on before she could speak again. ‘I mean, we don’t know what that is. The lights in the sky… they c–could be meteorites. I’ve seen them many–’

The woman’s pinched face stiffened. ‘Don’t talk rot!’ She glared at Leon’s father. ‘Ames, is your boy as big a fool as he sounds? See it right there!’ She kept pointing upwards. ‘The Legiones Astartes have come!’

The youth looked to his father for support but Ames was shaking his head; and again the townsfolk were all talking at once, and whatever he said went ignored.

+++Broadcast Minus Eight Weeks [Solar]+++

THE TRAIN OF empty cargo capsules passed through the ultraviolet anti-bacteria field and out of the throat of the Skyhook, the complex handling claws and mag-rail points snapping back and forth. Occasional flashes of sparks and running lights cast weak, sporadic illumination inside the depot complex at the foot of the space elevator. An identical train of pods moved in the opposite direction, these ones laden with vac-sealed sheaves of freeze-dried crops. With a grind of gears, the line of six capsules mated to the ascent line and they rose up the steep ramp until the train was moving vertically. The drive-head engaged and the pods raced away, up towards the night. In two hours’ time, they would be in the microgravity zone of the loading station in low geostationary orbit. There, mechanical menials would unload the train and move the cargo to a staging area, ready to await the arrival of the next interstellar freighter. The operation went on without a human hand in the process.

Across the yard, the other, empty pods ground to a sudden halt as they moved beneath the unblinking eye of a terahertz-wave scanner. An alert horn hooted twice and the train shunted sideways, all six pods opening automatically. Chem-nozzles on spidery manipulator arms unfolded from the ceiling and began to probe the interiors of the capsules, coughing spurts of caustic foam into the darkened corners. The sensor had detected something inside one of the pods, and initiated a pest-control subroutine. It wasn’t unknown for creatures from other biospheres to make their way through the loading–unloading process, and off-world vermin had the potential to wreck a colony’s entire ecosystem.

Nothing alive was meant to find its way up or down the Skyhook, no passengers, only inert cargo. The single landing strip out in Oh-One that could be considered a space port was the sole point of contact between off-worlders and the colony, although it was very rarely used. The transports that came for the planet’s bounty occasionally off-loaded supplies, but mostly they came to gather up the harvest and take it away. The crews of those vessels didn’t bother to venture down to the surface; they let their cogitators handle the business of arrival and departure. No one wanted to stay near Virger-Mos II any longer than they had to.

The nozzles found their target and bracketed it with bursts of hot liquid; but the life-form inside walked through the boiling rain and clambered out onto the floor of the depot. The automated system was not programmed to anticipate anything like intelligent behaviour from a xenos pest, and so did nothing as the man doffed the plastoid oversuit that had protected him from the chill, folding it away in a case on his back.

He removed the backpack and separated it into two discrete sub-cases, and after a few minutes of preparation, he walked on. The new arrival casually made his way across the depot, taking care to skirt the autonomous loaders, until he reached one of the few human-accessible maintenance bays. It hadn’t been used in decades, and it was an effort to get the doors open; but once he was done, the man was able to make his way out of the facility and onto the mainway.

Because his masters had trained him exceptionally well, no one in Town Forty-Four saw him; at least, not until he wanted them to.

He’d changed into a commonplace, but well appointed, traveller’s robe, and after crossing around the edge of the township, he doubled back and approached from the east. He would appear to be walking in from across the plainslands, out of the warm, dusty evening.

It wasn’t necessary for him to ask directions or even consult the detailed topographic map copied from the files of the Departmento Terra Colonia. Every town like this one was the same; not in a literal sense, not in the manner of the lay of roads and of houses, but in character. The dynamic of the settlement matched those on dozens of other human worlds; the personalityof the place, for want of a better word, was alike.

Even as Mendacs let himself be drawn towards the lights and the noise coming from the tavern, he was opening up his senses to Town Forty-Four. He wanted to know it; and in many ways, he already did.

He entered the hostelry and was immediately aware of every eye upon him. That came as no surprise; an unannounced visitor in a remote township such as this one was akin to a minor miracle. Even as he crossed the room to the auto-bar on the far side, conversations were starting up, loaded with speculation about who he was or where he might be from.

He ordered a bottle of a coarse local beer from the mechanical tending the counter, and waited for the first of them to gather enough courage to approach. He took care pouring the ale into a glass, using the moment to discreetly survey the room. There were pushpull chairs and gaming tables here and there. Regicide seemed popular in this place, and that was good; it gave him a point of commonality with the locals that he could exploit.

Perhaps a third of the beer was gone when, at last, a man spoke to him. ‘Pardon, esquire,’ he began, inclining his head. ‘Silas Cincade. Can I ask if you’re from the Tolliver ranches?’

It was a poorly concealed gambit intended to draw him out, but it was exactly what he wanted. ‘I’m afraid not,’ he replied, with a smile. ‘My name is Mendacs. I’m, ah, passing through.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Cincade, although it was clear he didn’t. ‘Have you ridden in? I have stables for any rovers.’ Mendacs caught the aroma of engine oil on the man.

He gave a shake of the head. ‘I walked. From the next settlement.’

Cincade’s eyes widened. ‘From Two-Six? That’s quite a hike!’

‘Two-Six,’ Mendacs repeated, with a nod. ‘It is. And dry with it.’ He gently modified his tone, dropping the softer, more educated manner of a core worlder to emulate something closer to the rough-edged vowels of the mechanic’s colonist accent. ‘I admit it gave me a thirst.’ He saluted with the beer, and Cincade nodded back with a knowing smirk, ordering the same for himself.

‘Cuts the dust, that’s truth.’

Mendacs saw that Cincade’s compatriots – a chubby man, a youth and a dour fellow in a tunic – were sat around a gaming table, trying not to appear interested in the newcomer. ‘I’d like to take the weight off me,’ he went on, gesturing at the bags he carried. ‘Get a little distraction into the bargain.’

‘Games?’ Cincade raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you play castles, then?’ It was a common variant of Regicide that dated back to before the Great Crusade, and Mendacs did indeed know it, along with many ways to cheat himself into the winner’s circle.

He nodded. ‘I dabble.’

Cincade was already walking away. ‘We got a spare seat over here. Come join, if you’d like.’

‘Absolutely.’ Mendacs gathered up his drink and followed.

WITHIN A COUPLE of hours, he had slowly allowed himself to lose a small amount of Imperial scrip, and the looks on the faces of Cincade and his associates when Mendacs offered to cover the loss with a single gold Throne told him what he wanted to know. He tossed the coin onto the board and watched the pattern of their thoughts on their faces.

The chubby one, Prael, fancied himself as something of an authority on everything, but in reality he was an abrasive personality, self-important and priggish. Mendacs doubted that the others seated around the table would have spent any time with him, had this not been a small town where they couldn’t avoid his company and the reactions any snub might create. The dour man, Kyyter, almost licked his lips to see the coin; but the youth, his son, showed a very different kind of greed. Mendacs could see the boy was withdrawn among the men, and starved for anything of interest.

They were chatting amiably now, like good friends known for years and years. It was a gift, to be able to read people as he could. As easy as breathing, Mendacs was deft at drawing others into what seemed like polite, casual conversation. The fact was, people liked to talk about themselves, and they would often do so if only one would give them opportunity and impetus.

Only the boy kept probing at him; and after a while, Mendacs knew it was time to give up a little of his own mystery.

‘I’m travelling the outer colonies all across the Dominion of Storms,’ he explained. ‘I’m a remembrancer.’ He glanced at the youth. ‘Do you know that term, Leon?’

He got a vigorous nod in return. ‘You’re creating artworks for the Administratum. Documenting the glory of the Imperium.’

‘The glory?’ said Ames, with a half-smirk that didn’t mask the true acid beneath it. ‘There’s not much of that hereabouts, I’ll mark you.’

‘Respectfully, I disagree,’ said Mendacs. ‘The golden oceans of grain, the perfect blue of your skies… Oh, sir, there is beauty here. And it would do well for those who walk the halls of Terra to know of it.’