As far as he knew, it had not rained in the Hegemon for three years.
The custodes were abroad, watching over the inner reaches of the Precinct, majestic in their ornate golden armour. Their plume crests were crimson, like sprays of arterial blood frozen in the air. The pre-Unity symbol of the lightning bolt was blazoned on their armour. They lurked in the gloomy halls and shadowed cloisters of the Palace, their Guardian spears upright, frighteningly vigilant.
They were impassive, silent, and they guarded their secrets solemnly, but in their very presence there was a truth to be unpicked.
He noted their deployment. Two custodes were watching the Southern Circuit that snaked like silver braid towards the Hegemon. Two more stood at the Jade Bailey, and another three patrolled beneath the fretted ironwork and malachite of the Congressional. A lone custodes, almost invisible, held position under the waxy emerald leaves of the Qokang Oasis, watching the outfall of the crystal-clear pleasure lake thunder down into the turbine gulf in misty cascades. Four more prowled the upper platforms of the Taxonomic Towers.
There were, however, none on the Northern Circuit, and none on the western limits of the lake, and none near the Investiary. It was so telling. They were like visible moons betraying the position of an invisible planet, bright astral bodies pushed into a certain pattern by the gravitational ministrations of an unseen star. By noting where they were, and where they weren’t, he could determine the location of his prey.
The Hall of Leng seemed most likely. From the disposition of the steadfast custodes, his prey had to be somewhere in the western hemispheric portion of the Precinct, which meant the Hall of Leng, the House of Weapons, the Great Observatory, or the private apartments adjoining the latter two, but he knew the Hall of Leng was a favourite place. When he wasn’t sequestered in secret toil in the deep, private crypts of the Palace, his prey was known to spend a great deal of time in the Hall, measuring the angles of space and time.
It was said that past and future co-mingled at that site, and had done so since primordial times, before the place had owned the name Leng, before his prey had been born, before a roof had been raised above it, or human eyes had seen it. The Hall of Leng, long-beamed and dark, was simply a domestication of one of the materium’s anomalies, a pulled thread in the fabric of time, a scab on the skin of space.
He had never felt comfortable in the Hall. It was filled with a tangible darkness, which seemed to exhale softly, like the respiration of a slumbering god, but it was a fitting place, and it would serve.
He approached the Hall from the south-west, following an ouslite walkway that had been laid along an avenue of sycamore and silver birch. He no longer wore a guise of any kind, no more fake lamp-lighters or pretender carpet-beaters, no more displacer field to mask his stature. He had unfolded the cobweb-thin falsehood out of its tiny silver box and wrapped himself in it. It felt as cold and light as snowflakes on his shoulders, back and scalp. Light ignored him, as if he no longer merited notice. It bent around him, twisted away, avoided his form and, in avoiding him, robbed him of shadows and colours too.
As inconsequential as a whisper, he walked the avenue of trees, and crossed the lawns behind the Hall. He could smell oblative incense, and hear the gentle creak and moan of the Hall’s unnatural harmonics.
His weapon was ready: a Nei Monggol punch-dagger, sharpened to a refined keenness of edge that no genestock knife grinder could have matched. The blade was laced in catastrophically lethal nematode venom distilled and refined from qash resin.
Enough to slay a demigod? He believed so. Enough to finish a blood game, certainly.
There were no locks. He had memorised the traceries of the quantum alarms, and the lumin sensors simply disdained to read his falsehood. He gripped the blade in his left hand.
The light in the outer portico seemed opaque, as if stained brown by smoke. He padded forwards across black tiles that had been worn dull by centuries of visitors. Pure meltwater dripped into a stone basin beside the inner doors. Above the doorframe, in bas relief, the architrave showed the tribulations of the first pilgrims to visit Leng.
The inner doors were heavy and older than the Palace, framed panels of ancient mountain oak, half a metre thick, worn and handmade, none of the angles quite true. He lifted the black iron latch, and pushed one of the doors open. Air hushed out at him. It smelled of cold stone.
The immense Hall was starlight-dark and midnight-silent. Every now and then, a sound breathed through the black space, a sound that was almost the gust of a Himalazian wind and almost the crush of breakers on an ocean coast, but not in fact either of those things. Small orange sparks danced under the high roof, like fireflies, like ignis fatui.
He watched them, adapting his eyes to darkness. He began to pick up the silver outlines of objects in the halclass="underline" columns, ancient statuary, and the assayers and binding apparatus set up by antiquarians of previous epochs and never removed. The devices stood like giant metal insects in the gloom, probe arms raised like mantis limbs, metal wingcases marked with arcane, abstruse symbols for settings and degrees. They were gathering dust.
He slipped between them. Somewhere ahead of him, somewhere close by, a presence lingered. It was distracted, its mind detained by other things. It had not noticed him. It had not even felt him.
He moved around a column, its cold flutes against his back, and set eyes on his prey.
In the centre of the Hall’s broad, open floor, his prey was kneeling, engrossed, turning the pages of a massive leather-bound codex. The codex was open on the stone floor like a spread-eagled bird, its spine a metre and a half long. Beautiful hands slowly turned the pages. They were sculptor’s hands, artisan’s hands.
His prey had his back to him. His prey was wearing a hooded white cloak. It would show the blood.
A common assassin might creep forwards, to steal up on his target stealthily from behind, but this prey was far too dangerous and aware for such timid techniques. Now he was in striking distance, he had no option but to pounce. After ten months, one chance was all he was going to get.
He surged forwards, his arm rising.
Halfway there, with the tip of his punch-dagger just a moment away from the centre of his prey’s broad back, a shadow came the other way to meet him.
Fluid darkness intercepted his blade. The punch-dagger was wrenched aside, and his strike was shorn of its momentum. He turned.
He could barely see his assailant. Another falsehood was defying the light. The attacker drove in at him, a shadow against a shadow. He glimpsed the long, straight blade of a spatha.
He deflected one sword-blow over-hand, and another under-hand, swinging the punch-dagger around. Each impact rang out with a sharp clang of metal on metal. Sparks flew. He backed hastily across the black tiles as the falsehooded swordsman moved against him.
Their blades clashed again. The punch-dagger afforded him no reach. The advantage was entirely with the swordsman. The clatter of metal against metal seemed atrociously sharp in the breathy silence of the Hall.
Despite the nuance of his grip, the spatha flicked the punch-dagger clean out of his hand. It embedded itself, quivering, in a nearby stone column. He went in with his bare hands, banging aside the rising sword blade with the back of his right hand and locking his fingers around the wrist of his attacker’s sword arm. He hooked his foot out to sweep the swordsman’s legs out from under him, but the swordsman leapt the sweeping calf and tried to snatch his wrist free.