Blood Pact

ONE The Solace

The dead seemed to have a knack of finding their way back to Balhaut.

Such had been the opinion of E. F. Montvelt’s uncle, soon after the Famous Victory, and such was the opinion of E. F. Montvelt himself, some fifteen years later. E. F. Montvelt had inherited the opinion from his late uncle, just as he had inherited his uncle’s post as wharfinger of Pier Thirty-One, a large and florid nose, and a carton of personal effects which included a medal from the days of the Khulan Wars, a pot of hair tincture and a pornographic chapbook featuring the celebrated musical theatre performer Adele Coro.

The dead found their way back, in almost unimaginable numbers. It was as if the blood that had soaked into Balhaut’s soil during the accomplishment of the Famous Victory had, by some alchemical reaction, become a lure for the dead: a temptation, a siren song that called them back across space from the far-flung places where they had fallen. E. F. Montvelt had once read, in one of the cyclopedias packed into the bottom of his uncle’s carton of effects, of predatory fish with nostrils so acute that they could detect a drop of blood in an ocean of water, and seek it out. So it was with Balhaut and the dead. Balhaut was the drop of blood, and space the ocean. The dead could smell the place, and the smell drew them back. They had made a pact in blood, after all.

Balhaut, so steeped in blood, had become the place of pilgrimage for the dead, and for many, many living souls too; souls whose lives were tied to the fallen. Balhaut was where people came to be buried, if they were dead, or to mourn, if they were not. This was because of the Famous Victory.

Even after fifteen years, one was obliged to pronounce the words with emphatic capital letters, or else refer to it as Slaydo’s Glory or the Intrepid Action or the Turning Point, or some equally leatherbound phrase. Balhaut was still counted as the most considerable victory of the crusade so far, and was therefore a touchstone of success, emblematic of all Imperial aspirations and, by extension, a place where the dead could be interred and mourned in the uplifting glow of triumph. The caskets of the officer classes were carried back to Balhaut to be shut in the mausoleums and crypts of the new regimental chapels. The tagged bones of common soldiers were shipped back to fill the ever-increasing plots in the endlessly expanding cemetery fields. The ashes of the nameless dead, the faceless and unidentified, were freighted in kegs like gunpowder to be scattered into the wind at the mass public services held five times a day, every day.

The bereaved came too. Some brought their dead with them, in honour or agony, to see them laid to rest in Balhaut’s groaning soil. Others came to pay their respects to the tombs and marble markers of loved ones that had already found their way to Balhaut.

Others, the greatest number of all, came to Balhaut because they did not know the fate or final resting place of the sons and fathers, and brothers and husbands they’d lost, and thus chose Balhaut, with its symbolic value, as a site of memorial. In a decade and a half, Balhaut’s chief imports had become corpses and mourners, and its chief businesses, sericulture and monumental masonry.

E. F. Montvelt’s business was import and export, and the supervision thereof. He oversaw Pier Thirty-One, a radial spar of the giant orbital platform called Highstation, with a diligence and precision that he hoped would have made his uncle proud.

From his glass-floored office, he could look down on the ships moored in the pier’s slipways, and keep track of their comings and goings on a vast hololithic display, projected above him like a canopy of light. His rubricators, at their separate cogitators around the rim of the office, managed the inventories and duties, while vittaling clerks negotiated supply contracts, and fuelling burdens and laytimes were calculated.

All data was routed to him through plugs, but, like his uncle before him, he liked to use his eyes. He liked to watch a vessel in berth, and fret that it was taking too long to unload and clear so that another could take its position and pay a tariff of its own, just as he liked to complain when a slipway remained vacant for more than a day or two. He knew the tugs and lighters by sight, and the flitting cargo-servitors by their paint jobs and codes, and he could identify a pilot boat simply by the style and accomplishment of its attitude manoeuvres.

Above all, he enjoyed the view: from the office, straight down through the glass floor, through the thicket of girderwork and fuelling lines, through the scudding dots that were tugs and handlers, through the open structures and hard shadows of the giant slipways, and the radiation-scorched hulls of the vast ships that sat in them, down through it all into the brilliance of sunlight on slowly-tracking clouds, and the pinsharp clarity of the bright air, and the one hundred and forty-kilometre drop to the blue and grey and brown of Balhaut turning slowly below.

That particular day, the Gemminger Beroff Wakeshift was occupying the fourth slip, the Superluminal Grandee Ulysses the fifth, and the Pride of Tarnagua was beginning its pilot sequence to enter the eighth. The Relativistic Iterations of Hans Feingolt, line-lashed into slip seven, had developed an ignition fault that E. F. Montvelt had been told would delay its departure for a minimum of a week. He had already calculated the penalty tariff. The Eleksander Great Soljor was due to make shift in less than an hour, provided the charter agents could agree on the demurrage. In slip two, the Solace, just arrived, was beginning to discharge its cargo.

E. F. Montvelt hadn’t seen the Solace for two years. It was Plackett’s boat, and Plackett was known for long trailward runs down through Khulan and the Bethan Halo. However, the docket passed to him by the assistant rubricator told E. F. Montvelt that the Solace was eight months out of San Velabo, and had come to them from spinward. Plackett had changed his habits. E. F. Montvelt decided he would ask the shipmaster about it when he came on shore. E. F. Montvelt made a point of greeting each master in person. It was an old-fashioned courtesy that his uncle had taught him.

He already suspected the answer Plackett would give him. War changes fortunes and the contours of trade. The crusade had reopened much of the Khan Group and other spinward territories. Plackett had gone where the business was.

Except it wasn’t Plackett. E. F. Montvelt looked at the docket again. The Solace had changed hands. The name of her new owner was written up as Jonas.

‘Jonas,’ he read. Several of his clerks raised their heads from their work.

‘You spoke, sir?’ one called out.

E. F. Montvelt looked up at the junior man.

‘Jonas,’ he repeated. ‘Docket gives the name of the Solace’s master as Jonas.’

‘Which matters because?’

‘Jonas!’ snapped E. F. Montvelt. ‘You know? As in Jonas?’

‘I don’t catch the significance, sir,’ admitted the clerk.

They were all young idiots these days, E. F. Montvelt often reminded himself, too young. None of them knew the traditions. In his uncle’s day, everybody had known the name Jonas. It was a joke name, a makeweight. You wrote it on the docket as a placeholder when you didn’t know the master’s actual name. Sometimes rogue traders would even run under the name to conceal their identity or divert attention away from an affreightment scam.

‘Jonas!’ E. F. Montvelt repeated. ‘As in, Devil Jonas!’

‘Oh,’ nodded the junior, ‘like in the children’s story? What was it he had again? A box, was it?’

‘A locker,’ E. F. Montvelt sighed.

‘That’s it, a locker,’ the junior laughed, ‘far away in the depths of space, where he kept the souls of poor, shipwrecked wayfarers.’

The junior chuckled at the notion, and shook his head.

E. F. Montvelt went down to slipway two himself.

He made his way through the crowds thronging the quay. Crew and passengers were flooding off the ship, and all kinds of humanity had come to greet it. There were the slipway crews, the excise men in their bicorn hats, the inspectors from the Interior Guard, vittalers, itinerant peddlers, porters, hucksters; grifters offering guided tours of the battlefields, luxurious accommodations or surface transfers; scalpers selling permits and ask-no-questions paperwork; and commercial men and private citizens, who had come up to Highstation to greet the ship. E. F. Montvelt shoved his way through the bustle. He could smell armpits and foul breath, the garlic sweat of meat patties on a stove cart, the burnt sugar of a candy vendor, the ozone coming in off the pier’s atmospheric pressure fields and, behind all other odours, the oddly soapy, rancid fug that hung upon a slipway when a ship exhaled the recycled air that had been wheezing through its oxygen scrubbers for eight months.

Servitors chugged past him, hauling trains of crates. A tug boat whickered by overhead, its running lights flashing. The Solace, a juggernaut of pitted rust and seared void plating, sat up tall in the slip. Service crews were already at work, scaling her carbonised flanks like mountaineers on a rockface. E. F. Montvelt heard the tunk-tunk of magnetised footsteps as servitors crossed the hull perpendicular to him. He leaned over the rail, down into the shadow of the slipway drop. He saw the airgates extended and connected, and the firework sputter of welding teams. Below the gloom of the slip’s shadow, the dazzling white clouds of Balhaut crawled past.

E. F. Montvelt opened his data-slate and took another look at the ship’s paperwork. The Solace, it came as no surprise, was bearing the dead. Amongst the goods on its bill of lading were ‘Fifty mortuary containers, fully certificated, transported for the purpose of internment at Balhaut’. Further fine print revealed that each container held twenty human cadavers or partial cadavers, individually secured in closed caskets. They were men of the 250th Boruna Rifles, a native Balhaut regiment, and casualties of Aldo’s tragic failure on Helice. They were Balhaut lads, coming home.

Accompanying parties of mourners from San Velabo were listed on the passenger manifest. High-borns, some of them, by the look of the titles and honorifics, making the grand tour to Balhaut in a formal display of duty and respect. E. F. Montvelt straightened his collar, and brushed the sleeves of his coat. Courtesy, always courtesy.

The great hold jaws of the Solace were beginning to gape. Cantilevered metal tongues, cargo ramps and hinged bridgeways were extending to link the lamp-lit caverns of the hold spaces with the slipway dock. Bulk servitors were hoisting down the first of the containers. E. F. Montvelt saw more passengers and members of the crew coming down the nearest gangway bridge.

He saw two widows, arm-in-arm, with a single, twin-shafted mourning parasol held above their veiled heads. Behind them came three liveried servants bearing a rosewood chest, and a crewman in oily pressure gear draped with a roll of heavy cable. After them, a tired-looking colonel with an empty sleeve limped down the gangway beside his attentive adjutant, followed by a tall, athletic man in a long coat of beige leather. The man’s shaved head was sculptural and sharp-featured, as if it had been ergonomically designed. The balance of the skull seemed rather off: a cunning, clean-enough face, but a compact and streamlined cranium that seemed a little too small to match it. The man carried himself with a straight neck and a raised head that spoke of military formality.

Then E. F. Montvelt saw the other widow. She was dressed in long weeds of black silk, and carried a sable fan and a purple handkerchief. The skirts of her dress, silk and crepe layered, rustled as she moved. Her hair, white gold, was pinned up, and from it draped a veil of black gauze so fine it hung like smoke. He could not see her face, but he could see the pale, slender rise of her neck. The nape seemed indecent, like wilful nudity.

E. F. Montvelt walked towards the passengers discharging onto the dockside.

‘Master Jonas?’ he inquired. ‘Master Jonas?’

No one seemed bothered to acknowledge him.

‘Where’s your master?’ he asked the crewman with the cable. The man shrugged indifferently. Annoyed at his manner, E. F. Montvelt tapped the badges and buttons of guild, of rank and of Munitorum service that he wore on the left breast of his juniper coat.

‘You’re on my shore now!’ he told the listless fellow.

‘And glad of it,’ the man answered, shifting the heavy coil to his other shoulder.

‘Where is the master of this vessel?’ E. F. Montvelt asked.

‘The lady there, she asked him to check upon her cargoes personal,’ the man replied, nodding towards the widow with the scandalous nape.

‘Mamzel?’ E. F. Montvelt called as he approached her. ‘Begging your pardon, but would you know where the shipmaster is to be found?’

‘Oh dear, he is dead,’ the lady answered. Her voice was small, but perfectly clear, and rounded with a distant accent. There was a wobble to it too, as if she was fighting to contain her emotions.

‘He is dead?’

‘Indeed, most terribly,’ she agreed, with another catch in her voice.

‘But how?’ E. F. Montvelt asked.

‘Why, we were obliged to murder him when he would not cooperate with us,’ she said. E. F. Montvelt could not see her face through the fine mesh of the veil, but he felt her eyes fix upon him, registering his expression of disquiet.

‘What did you say, mamzel?’ he asked.

‘I cannot lie,’ said the veil. ‘I am sorry for it.’

‘Mamzel,’ said E. F. Montvelt, concerned by the rising strength of the catch in her voice, ‘are you quite well?’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I cannot speak a lie. Upon my soul, it is my great burden. I am compelled to tell each and every truth, even the dirty ones.’

‘Perhaps you should sit down?’ E. F. Montvelt suggested.

‘My dear sister, have you over-wrought yourself again?’

The tall man in the long, beige coat appeared at the widow’s side, and was placing a solicitous hand on her sleeve. His hands were gloved.

‘This gentleman asked me about the shipmaster,’ the lady said.

The man looked at E. F. Montvelt. Like the widow, his voice was spiced by a distant accent.

‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘My sister is rather troubled, and you must excuse her. Grief has terribly affected her mind.’

‘I am sorry to hear it,’ E. F. Montvelt responded earnestly. ‘It was not my intention to distress her.’

‘I did not for a moment presume it was, sir,’ the man said. He was holding his sister’s arm quite tightly, as if she might otherwise slip her lines and fly away.

‘It is true, though,’ the lady said. ‘I cannot tell any lies. Not ever, anymore. It is quite beyond me to do so. This is the price I must pay. If I desire the truth, I must have all truths, so that only truth can spill out of my mouth and–’

‘Hush now, sister,’ the man said, ‘you will make yourself ill. Let me take you to a quiet place where you can gather your wits.’ He glanced at E. F. Montvelt. ‘Sir?’

‘There is a lounge in the disembarkation hall, there at the end of the slipway,’ said E. F. Montvelt, pointing.

‘You’re most kind,’ the man said. ‘The Lady Eyl appreciates your understanding. She does not know what she says.’

‘Well, that is apparent,’ said E. F. Montvelt. ‘I asked the whereabouts of the shipmaster, and she told me plainly that she had murdered him.’ He laughed. The man did not.

‘It is because I am witched!’ the widow protested.

‘The shipmaster went to hold sixteen aft, to attend to our baggage,’ the man said. ‘I believe you will find him there.’

‘I’m obliged to you,’ said Montvelt.

The man took his sister away. Montvelt went up the gangway and entered the ship. He cued the manifest list back onto the screen of his data-slate and scrolled down it. Lady Eyl. There she was, Lady Ulrike Serepa fon Eyl, of San Velabo, travelling with her brother Baltasar Eyl and a household party.

Still rather discomfited by his encounter with the damaged Lady Eyl, E. F. Montvelt descended into the bowels of the ancient packet ship. He wondered who she had lost. A husband, he felt. Perhaps another brother. Such things she had said. For a mind to be that torn and frayed by grief, well, it did not bear thinking about. The dead came back to Balhaut, and brought their ghosts with them, but the truly frightening apparitions were the souls destroyed by loss.

The underdecks of the Solace were quiet: dark halls, dark companionways, a current of heat against his face, dissipating from the drive vents, the bad odour of air breathed too many times, the sounds of hull fabric creaking and settling as commonplace orbital gravity replaced the distorting insanity of the Empyrean.

Caged lamps glowed soft yellow, their once-white shades stained brown by age. Oily condensation dripped from the pipes of the climate systems running along the ceiling. The Solace was clicking and settling and easing her bones, like the arthritic grand dame she was. E. F. Montvelt enjoyed the smells and sounds of a thoroughbred packet ship. He’d crewed one, the Ganymede Eleison, in his youth, serving three years as junior purser before his uncle’s influence secured him a shore-job at Highstation. The hollow echoes of footsteps on deck grilles, the low stoops of the bulkhead hatches, the scents of priming paint and grease and scrubbed air brought it all back.

Without needing to check the doorframe code markers, for the Solace’s layout matched the deck plan of all ships of her class, E. F. Montvelt found hold sixteen aft.

The air inside was full of vapour. The hold’s jaws were open, so that sunlight shone in, and a magnificent open drop down to ferociously white and snowy clouds was revealed through the cage floor of the stowage space. He stepped out onto the cage floor, Balhaut turning below him, and called out the shipmaster’s name.

No one answered.

Bulk containers were lashed along the cage, ready to be discharged by the servitor-handlers. Their certificates had been pasted to them, and their seals were intact. E. F. Montvelt called the shipmaster’s name again.

He took out his scanning wand, and flashed the nearest container to check that its certificate code matched the number on his dockets.

It did, but there was something odd. The wand had registered a temperature blip.

He put his hand against the container’s side, and then drew it away again sharply.

‘Something wrong?’ asked the man in the beige coat. He came down through the steam onto the cage floor, and approached the wharfinger.

‘These containers,’ E. F. Montvelt replied. ‘They are not what they seem, sir.’

‘How so?’

‘Trace heat,’ the wharfinger replied. ‘There is a mechanism here. These are not containers.’ He showed Baltasar Eyl the dial of his wand. ‘You see?’

‘I do.’

‘Test for yourself.’

The man pressed his gloved hand against the container’s side.

‘No, sir, take off your glove and do it,’ said E. F. Montvelt.

Baltasar Eyl peeled off his right glove. The hand that was revealed was so terribly marked by old scars that the sight of it made E. F. Montvelt baulk. Eyl saw his reaction.

‘I keep them covered, for the most part,’ he explained. ‘I know how they look. They proclaim the pact I have made with my master.’ The wharfinger stared at him, wide-eyed. Eyl smiled.

‘I don’t expect you to understand. Listen to me, I gab like my sister. The isolation of the voyage has made me talkative. I am betraying secrets.’

E. F. Montvelt took a step or two back.

‘I have seen nothing,’ he said. ‘Truly, sir, I have heard nothing.’

‘Why do you say that to me?’ asked Eyl.

‘Because I fear that otherwise you are going to be obliged to kill me,’ said E. F. Montvelt.

‘I think I might,’ said Eyl. ‘Sincerely, I mean nothing by it.’

‘Please, sir,’ said the wharfinger, backing away.

‘A most dreadful thing!’ cried Lady Eyl, running along the slipway quay. ‘A most terrible accident! He fell. He just fell! Please come! There has been the most awful occurrence!’

E. F. Montvelt dropped away from the open hold jaws of the Solace. Arms spread wide, he descended into air and bright cloud. It was a long way down.

He was approaching terminal velocity, already dead. The atmosphere began to ablate him, until a tail of fire was racing out behind him, the sort of shooting star upon which one might make a wish.

He fell towards the planet. He and his late uncle had been quite correct.

The dead did seem to have a knack of finding their way back to Balhaut.