Whilst exacting his revenge on those who made off with them.
The interior of the Broken Harvest was a curious piece of engineering. In a human-built ship, tightly stacked rooms would take up all the space not occupied by machinery. Here were branching, round-sectioned tunnels, shafts heading off at odd angles that suggested the a-grav wasn’t always pointed in the same direction. Everything seemed to be made of mother-of-pearl, gleaming white with a rainbow sheen. Golden geometric traceries bloomed at random points, extended and flourished, then atrophied and died even as Kris watched, reabsorbed back into the matrix of the walls. Messages, warnings or readouts? Or just art? Impossible to know.
Then they were half walking, half skidding down a slope, entering a room shaped like a flattened oval with scalloped edges. More armed men clustered here, with a couple of the humanoid Castigar that Kris remembered. She also noted Heremon, the Tothiat woman, wearing a robe thrown over a light armour coat. The sunburst figure that was Aklu’s heraldry was displayed on her chest, and the back was slit so her lobstery passenger could take the air.
The Unspeakable itself was at the room’s centre, still set into its ornamented a-grav couch. It remained a figure of awe, just this side of supernatural. It’s just a barnacle! Kris wanted to yell at the gunmen. Just a whelk with delusions of grandeur. And yet, stood before the gaze of those stalked red eyes, it was more than that. She had no idea how the Essiel had claimed so much of the known galaxy, but for sure they had something up their notional sleeves.
The prancing Hiver major-domo stood beside the throne, as fancy as ever. Their two-faced head was turned to suggest the next few moments would involve more tragedy than comedy. Within their latticed body, insect-like elements chased one another around its core.
‘Have you redeemed yourself, my wayward son?’ their bell tones chimed, as they took a birdlike step towards Mesmon. ‘Or have your failures bowed your borrowed back, so that you lose all use to the Unspeakable?’
‘See for yourself,’ Mesmon growled, plainly not fond of being the butt of the thing’s odd wit. He gave an angry gesture, and the man with the case marched forward, presenting it for the Hiver’s inspection. The creature made no attempt to open the case, but their head tilted a little, as though listening. On its floating throne, Aklu made a flurry of sharp gestures.
‘Oh, Mesmon, once again you disappoint.’ The Hiver took a step sideways, arms unfolding a pair at a time into a whole family of open-handed poses. The man who’d carried the case fell sideways and a gout of blood shot along the iridescent floor. It didn’t pool or flow in any one direction but separated out into individual tendrils, forming curlicues and arabesques of dark red. Kris blinked. She’d not even seen the Hiver with a blade, but one of those formal gestures had signified murder.
The case fell from nerveless hands and broke open when it hit the floor. It was empty.
Mesmon let out a grunt. It was a remarkably small sound really, to contain the vast amount of rage visible on his face. Then he was lunging for them and Kris knew he was going to rip someone’s head off their shoulders. And that was just for starters.
Solace tried to get in his way and took an elbow to the temple that sent her tumbling aside. Even as she fell, Olli rammed her walking frame into Mesmon’s groin. It didn’t seem to inconvenience him much; apparently those parts were as resilient as all the rest of him. With a snarl of frustration he reached down and just picked up the entire frame, its legs kicking madly, about to dash Olli and her conveyance to pieces on the floor.
‘Hold,’ the Hiver said. ‘Stay your hand.’ They had taken one more step, and Aklu’s couch shifted too, the Essiel’s several eyes craning.
‘It may well come to pass,’ the Hiver continued carefully, as though working extra hard to translate the gestures and rumbles of their master, ‘that we shall have our fill of broken bones. That truth must be extracted from these few like corks from bottles: in we drive the point, and out the rush of ruptured fluid comes. Not yet, not this one, cousin that she is. The Hook admires her.’
Mesmon replaced Olli and stepped back. His expression suggested his bloodlust was undiminished. For her part, the specialist looked more alarmed at Aklu’s forbearance than at the violence. Cousin?
‘The wreck of the Oumaru is not here,’ the Hiver tolled. ‘Our sacred relics likewise are astray. To take the knot of any of their lives, and pull it taut, might be to cut the string that leads us to our treasure, might it not? They shall give up the one who knows, and know that if they fail then we shall start with toes, with fingers, faces, eyes and all the parts a man may part with long before he dies.’