While the sirdar watched, a damogaur and two packsons arrived, and gained access to the outer cage using a pass key. They talked briefly to the duty watchmen, who then used their own key to let them through the inner cage. A few minutes later, a different damogaur exited alone, locking the outer cage securely with his own key.
The sirdar followed him along the service deck to a traverse, waited while a detail of packsons hurried past, then called out a question to catch the damogaur’s attention. The sirdar left his body stuffed in a service locker.
The sirdar returned to the brig with the damogaur’s key.
Without hesitation, he let himself in.
The security watchmen looked up at him.
‘Desh arad voi toltoom,’ the sirdar said. More interviews.
‘Who?’ asked one of the watchmen.
‘Enkil vahakan,’ the sirdar replied.
The security watchmen hesitated. One said they hadn’t been notified. Nothing was scheduled.
‘He has set new questions,’ the sirdar replied with a shrug. ‘He wants them asked tonight. Are you going to be the ones who delay him getting the answers? It’s on you, brothers. I’ll just say you were doing your job.’
The watchmen glanced at each other. One got up, unlocked the inner cage, then slid it open.
‘The grace of his voice guide you and drown out all untruths,’ the sirdar said as he stepped through the cage. ‘I will not be long.’
The brig block was a stinking, infernal realm. It was lit by age-stained lumen globes set in iron cages, and the deck and walls had never been cleaned. They were caked with the residue of pain and suffering. Some of the cells in the block were unoccupied. Through the open hatch of one, the sirdar saw a man being tortured by the damogaur he’d seen entering the brig ten minutes before. His packsons, stripped to the waist, were doing the work while the officer stood on and watched, asking the same question over and over.
The man was an Urdeshi colonel, a high value prisoner. He was so far gone, he was no longer making a sound or even flinching as the packsons worked at his flesh with flat-wire knives.
The man’s eyes just stared out past his tormentors into the hallway, gazing at a freedom he would never know. He caught the sirdar watching him. Their eyes locked.
The man’s staring eyes twitched. His mouth moved, leaking slightly. He knew. He saw what every Sekkite aboard had missed. Despite the uniform and the hand-strap mouth, he saw the sirdar’s eyes. The expression there. The horror and the pity.
The sirdar hesitated. He wanted to go in, to lay vengeance on the officer and the two packsons. He wanted to put the Urdeshi out of his suffering.
He could not afford that kind of diversion.
Very slowly, he shook his head. Don’t.
Then he made the sign of the aquila.
The Urdeshi did not respond. He simply closed his eyes.
The sirdar hurried on. Beyond the block of regular cells, there was an area reserved for more specialised containment. The notification mark on the page he’d torn out of Olort’s book matched a sigil scratched above the archway. Highest level securement.
He checked there was no one close by, then deactivated the screening field and stepped through the arch. The dank and rusted chamber beyond was octagonal. Each wall section was formed by a heavy hatch with a vox-speaker set into a large window of reinforced glass.
The hatch windows were dirty, but it was clear that each looked into a flooded cell. The sirdar peered into the nearest one. The fluid beyond the glass was murky green, drifting with fibrous scraps, like the dredged sediment of some polluted canal. There was a shadow in it. A human cadaver, rotting back to bone, floating like a revenant apparition. It looked like the corpse of a drowned mariner who had been in the water for a long time.
There was a similarly ragged corpse in the silted water of the next cell. The sirdar squinted in at it. The corpse within suddenly jerked its head and glared at him with rheumy, lidless eyes, its fleshless mouth snapping and chewing.
The sirdar recoiled from the glass. He could hear a scratchy, gurgling voice. It was coming from the cell’s vox speaker. He saw that cables were attached to the corpse’s temples.
These were stasis tanks, filled with nutrient fluid. The prisoners were held in suspension, their minds wired via augmetic links to vox-grilles that articulated their thoughts.
He moved to the third tank. The fluid suspension here was a little cleaner, as though it had only been filled a few days before. A drowned man drifted inside. His hair was black, his clothes the tattered fabric of Imperial Guard fatigues. Cables were fixed to his temples too. His flesh was bloodlessly white and shrivelled by long immersion.
‘Feth,’ the sirdar murmured. He knew the face. Time had passed, and it was older, but it was unmistakable.
He put his hand against the dirty glass.
‘Hello,’ he whispered. ‘Can you hear me? It’s me. It’s Oan.’
The figure inside stirred, as though it was twitching in a bad dream. A few oily bubbles broke from its lips.
The sirdar looked around. There was a control panel beside the hatch frame. He didn’t know much about stasis suspension. He didn’t know if abrupt removal would shock or damage the subject.
There was no time to debate it. He threw the switch that would open the sluices and drain the tank.
The fluid level inside the tank began to drop. The sirdar could hear it gurgling and flushing through the underdeck drains. The body inside was slowly revealed, losing its buoyancy and slumping into the corner of the metal vat.
As the fluid level dropped, the sirdar saw his own reflection in the glass, and took off his helmet. If the captive survived release, he wanted him to be able to see his face.
As soon as the fluid had dropped far enough, the sirdar opened the hatch. Excess water, stagnant and foul, sloshed out over his boots. The tank reeked of organic waste and bacterial processes.
The man inside was limp. Dead or unconscious. The sirdar grabbed him and dragged him out. His flesh was cold and extraordinarily colourless. The sirdar tore the cables out of his temples, leaving little bloodless punctures, and pumped at his chest. Brackish soup glugged out of his slack mouth and nostrils.
‘Come on,’ the sirdar whispered. ‘Don’t let this be hello again and goodbye.’
The man convulsed, and started to cough and choke. His eyes opened. He retched and spat out ropes of mucus and spittle while the sirdar supported him.
He looked up at the sirdar, blinking in the stale light. Some colour was returning, and his flesh began to show livid bruises from beatings and many minor combat injuries.
‘Oan?’ he asked, his voice made of nothing.
‘Hello, Brin,’ said Mkoll. ‘It’s been a long time.’
Mkoll locked his arms around Brin Milo, like a man greeting a son he’d thought he’d lost forever.
Thirteen: Up Into the Light
Luna Fazekiel had an excessively ordered and compulsive mind. It had been remarked upon, not always in a complimentary manner, and accounted for her career path into the Prefectus rather than a regular Militarum command.
When the Ghost companies and the retinue had arrived at the undercroft, an event that seemed like months ago to her, she had walked every centimetre of the cellars to learn the layout.