Lord Of The Night by Simon Spurrier

Author:Simon Spurrier [Spurrier, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

THE FOLLOWING DAY found her huddled over the steering pillar of an impeller bike, a great plume of ash towering behind her like the tail of a dusty rooster. She had cast off indolence, washed clean her indecision, and decided to act.

As she saw it, the distinction between observation and interference ran deep. She had been expressly forbidden from indulging in the latter. Kaustus's message had said nothing of the former.

In every city, and especially in every hive, Mita knew that there was a certain niche. Sometimes it was naturally filled. Often it was a position to be squabbled over, traded between those who felt inclined to occupy it. Inevitably there would come to each of these conflicts a natural resolution, a winner. Such characters were cunning. They were ruthless. They were scrupulous. They were clever.

She had made her enquiries discreetly, at the start. She had considered Cuspseal from the perspective of a social jigsaw, and had taken pains to direct her interest towards those pieces of a higher calibre – the guildhouse quartermasters, the merchant tsars of the docking quarters, the madams of Whoretown and the recruitment sergeants of the small Fleet Ultima offices adjacent to the precinct. She had thought such characters far more likely to be familiar with the goal of her enquiries than lesser souls.

She needn't have bothered to focus her attention so closely. In the minds of everyone she encountered, be they peon or bourgeoisie or authority, the existence of an information broker, a spymaster, a watcher, was as firm as cold rock. That none of them dared speak his name, or to be overseen in the act of betraying his identity, merely confirmed to Mita his monopoly.

His name was irrelevant. His whereabouts were not. She plucked it - ultimately - from the mind of a bounty hunter, drunk and leering, in a saloon on the outskirts of Cuspseal. He seemed to Mita to be a prime source of answers: such mercenary scum as he could be guaranteed to have had dealings with the broker, or at least his associates, at one time or another. She'd plunged her astral tentacles into his unresisting consciousness without thought for his safety, relishing the shouts of dismay from his fellow drinkers. Revulsion and disassociation were reactions to her mutation to which she had grown all too familiar, the ability to terrify was something she had had little chance to enjoy. Until now.

To skim a mind for the vaguest impressions of its inner workings was one thing, to hunt for specific detail was another, far more damaging thing entirely.

She shattered his mind and left his brain haemorrhaging - blood pouring from eyes and nose. Her own objectives outweighed everything now.

(Is this how Kaustus feels? she wondered This impunity? This endless authority?)

And so she found herself riding hard, impeller wheels grinding against litterflows and ash dunes, as she made her way towards the broker's home - deep in the teeming habzones of the eastern mezzanines.

Cog rode ahead, his primal instincts and hardwired reactions far superior to her own.

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