‘This Aklu?’
‘The Unspeakable Aklu, the Razor and the Hook,’ she recited in full, with a hard look at him. ‘My master is not casual about his honours.’
Which means precisely what the hell, exactly? Havaer wondered. Matters had suddenly gone sideways, as far as he was concerned. ‘What does he want me for?’
‘It’s enough that he wants you.’ Heremon looked away and that, apparently, was that.
There were another three toughs waiting at a higher platform. The atmosphere was thinner here, and the sunlight a hot glare against his skin. His medical monitor cautioned him about exposure times. He had no way to explain to it that the shit he was in counted as mitigating circumstances.
His comms implant received a ping telling him the local office had his position. Havaer didn’t particularly want to become the focus of a firefight, but he was starting to feel curious now the initial shock had worn off. He scratched at his jaw again, casual as anything, sending the command: Hold till my signal.
Just hope I don’t regret it.
Not quite a prisoner but far from a free man, he was cordially escorted to some concrete dump of a place, cracked and pitted and bleached by too much solar glare. Inside he was brought into a scene of utter carnage.
He missed the main feature of the room for some time, because the bloody foreground had his full attention. A couple of humaniform Castigar and a dozen humans were standing around watching someone get flayed alive.
Havaer just stopped, eyes bulging. He uttered a sound that he’d thought a career at Mordant House had ironed out of him. They had some luckless bastard strung up by his wrists from an a-grav frame while a six-armed golden Hiver with a sad metal face vivisected the poor sod. They’d pinned back his chest and abdomen, opening up the ribs and holding them in place with clamps and vices. The victim’s intestines and various other organs were spread out in an eerie halo about his body, floating in the a-grav field. He was somehow still alive, his blunt face locked in a savage grimace. His blood, and there was a lot of it, was also suspended in droplets. The nimble, darting arms of the Hiver were gathering them to draw designs in the air – a sanguine litany of alien art. The most terrifying thing about this barbaric, alien spectacle was that it wasn’t quite barbaric or alien enough that Havaer couldn’t see the pattern. It reminded him of nothing so much as what the Architects did to worlds. There was old history between the Hegemony and the Architects, wasn’t there? The clam bastards had suffered and lost worlds for an age before they worked out their trick with the Originator toys. Didn’t it make sense, then, that the trauma of those cataclysmic days had wormed its way into their psyches and their art? But this . . .
The victim groaned and gasped, and the Hiver took hold of his elbows and spun him gently. His array of innards – though they were no longer in – rippled like serpents around him. The blood patterns undulated and formed new arrangements, a message that Havaer was grateful he couldn’t read. Then he saw the black and yellow arthropod thing melded to the man’s back and understood. Another Tothiat. He wasn’t watching an execution, but a punishment for failure.
Then he looked past the display and realized he had been in the presence of ‘The Unspeakable’ all this time. There was an actual real live Essiel right there, hovering in its couch, watching its will be done.
The Hiver stepped away from their work and daintily shook their arms, the skin of blood sloughing off them into the a-grav field, leaving their hands gleaming and clean. At some signal, a couple of watchers stepped forwards gingerly, queasily even, and slid the victim away. His wounds were trying to heal, Havaer saw, but the a-grav field and clamps prevented the man’s bloody-minded resilience from doing its job. It must, he reflected, really, really hurt.
A tortured groaning sound shook the room and the Essiel’s array of arms flurried. The Hiver took a light step forwards and regarded him with their frowning gold mask.
‘Crows gather yet the shadow of the vulture passed above us, crossing past the bound of the horizon. Know this, mordant man: seek now to dip your beak, and you will meet the fury of our wings.’
Havaer blinked at them, then at the enigmatic bulk of the Essiel, Aklu. There were no crows, no birds of any sort, on the Essiel homeworld. They were an Earth thing, long extinct save where some planet had resurrected or transplanted them. The words were an attempt to give a human gloss to alien sentiments and he translated all that flowery doggerel as Hands off, it’s mine.
And ‘mordant man’。 His tax officer ID wasn’t fooling anyone. Or likely the Broken Harvest had access to some back-channel, which had ‘made him’ even as he entered the system. Or else the divine Essiel could read minds? I mean who actually knows for sure?