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The King of the Spoil – Extract

A Black Library Imprint

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Chapter 1

Haska Jovanic heard the tramp of footsteps on the stairs, and swore.

The walls of her domicile were made of flimsy compressed fibreboard, and were no barrier at all to the sounds of other people’s lives as they stumbled up and down the hab-block’s stairwell. She heard each step clearly, coming a few thumps at a time, then a pause as the climber caught their breath.

Haska swung her feet off the battered table that almost filled the hab’s tiny communal space, and looked around for her boots. She quickly pulled them on, cursing her laziness. She had woken late, so late that the red orb of Alecto’s star had already set, and although the brutal heat of the day had started to fade she had been wallowing in it, letting her mind turn over the usual bitter thoughts, one after the other.

The wall of the hab flexed inwards as the climber leant their weight against it. Haska could hear their laboured breathing, the cracked rattle that rasped across her nerves. A key-stave clicked in the lock – a nonsense that would not have slowed any Spoil thief for even a second – and the door swung open.

A skinny woman in her middle thirties was framed by the doorway, slumped against the jamb. Her cheeks were red from the effort of climbing the stairs, stark against the grey, drawn skin of her face. Despite the heat she wore several layers of holed pullovers, and patched novaplas trousers.

‘Haska? I wasn’t… expecting you’d be home,’ wheezed Verka Jovanic. After the climb to their floor, it would be a few minutes until Haska’s mother could get a whole sentence out in a single breath.

Haska stood up. ‘I was just leaving.’

Verka shuffled into her hab, blocking the doorway. She held a laden sack in each hand, and their combined weight bent her towards the floor. ‘Hold on, just let me–’

She didn’t finish. A hacking cough interrupted her, shuddering through her overtaxed body. After a moment, Haska took the sacks from Verka’s shaking hands. Her mother gave her a weak smile of thanks, and sputtered out a few more breaths. Verka pushed the door closed behind her, then slumped into a moulded plastek chair fixed to the table. Haska dropped the sacks onto the hab’s culina worktop.

‘Let’s talk for a minute,’ said Verka, a false, almost urgent cheer in her voice. Her eyes roamed Haska’s face, like she was checking for signs of illness, or as if she couldn’t quite remember what her daughter looked like.

‘I’m expected,’ Haska said. She and Verka rarely crossed paths like this. Haska tried to make sure of it. She grabbed her plasweave jacket from the seat where she’d been using it as a rest for her head, and shrugged it on over her sweat-stained shirt.

‘Have you heard?’ Verka blurted out. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Who’s dead?’ Haska asked, not listening for the answer. Death held no fear or mystery for anyone born inside the Spoil.

‘Sorokin. It’s… all over the clave.’

Haska stopped pawing at her sleeve, and slowly turned to face her mother. ‘Sorokin’s dead?’

For her entire life – for the whole of Verka’s, in fact – one person had been the master of the Spoil. Everything flowed from and to Andreti Sorokin. He ruled the patchwork alliance of Spoil gangs they called the Har Dhrol. He gave the clave-captains the licence to run their territories, to extract their tithes from their tenants, so long as they paid their dues to him. His crews were the ones that controlled the generatoria and vox-exchanges, the dispensaries and waste-harvesters. His word was the Lex, and his gangers were its enforcers.

‘How?’ she asked.

‘Assassinated, according to the street. Someone… got into his dorm. Cut his damned head off. It’s probably hanging in a trophy case already.’

‘That’s dross,’ Haska said immediately. Sorokin lived like a Throne-accursed merchant-baron. There was no way someone could have made it into the King of the Har Dhrol’s compound with murder in mind.

Verka shrugged. ‘Maybe. But Erastin has shut the factorum tonight. And he’s told us all not to turn up tomorrow.’

Haska blinked. She had been so lost in the enormity of it, the impossibility that Sorokin might be dead, that she had not considered what even the rumour of his death would mean for the clave, and for her.

Chaos would rule the Spoil tonight. There would be blood on the streets, probably for days, at least until the clave-captains figured out who would take Sorokin’s place.

It would be war.

Like most Spoil children, Haska had been part of a gang since she’d been tall enough to reach the hab’s door handle. She and Lira and Katryn had outgrown their juve crew at twelve, and the three of them were a tight-knit little band, trying like so many others to break into one of the Har Dhrol gangs. War would bring opportunity. Dead folk left gaps, and Haska and her crew had spent years picking up odd jobs for the gangers. They were known to the local clave-captains. This could be their time.

She tried to ignore the creeping fingers of fear climbing up her spine. Haska was not blind to the danger of what was playing out in her mind. She had seen her first dead body when she was three years old, a putrid ruin Haska had found while exploring a disused hab-stack. She’d seen her first killing at seven. But for all that she was a seasoned street-rat, Haska had never shaken her reluctance to shed blood.

At sixteen, she was well past the age by which most Spoilers had found their niche. Some fell in with the narco-gangs, sneaking into the city districts with plastek bags of bliss and topaz sewn into their clothes or lining their stomachs. More became street-blades, those idling gangers who did their clave-captain’s bidding and were always the first to die when a grudge could not be settled, or when an example needed to be made.

Most, like her mother, ended up in the workshops and factorums, selling the short span of their lives for a few meagre slates at the end of each day. They lived a pale, miserable existence, shackled to the hope that come the dawn there would be work, and that their wages would sustain them until the next sunrise.

A quick death on the street, or a slow one in the manufactorum. That was no choice, not really. And that was the thought that was never far from her mind, the kernel of bitterness at the world that she could not dislodge.

Haska realised she had been gripping the back of the chair, and let go.

‘Are you hungry?’ said Verka suddenly. ‘I picked up what I could.’ She waved a hand at one of the bags. ‘Terra knows if the dispensaries are going to have anything left by morning.’

Haska’s empty stomach momentarily pulled her thoughts away from gang politics and existential anger. ‘What did you get?’ she asked.

‘Starch, stamp, sticks.’ Verka forced a sing-song lilt to the refrain; the daily diet of the Spoil. Fist-sized blocks of starch, reclaimed from the dregs of the food-processing plants of the more affluent districts of Varangantua. Stamp, the all-encompassing term for reconstituted protein of even more dubious origin than the starch. And lho-sticks, to suppress the hunger of living at the literal bottom of the city’s food chain.

Verka reached over to the yellowed sack and pulled out a small, dented packet and a cheap igniter. ‘I managed to grab some vitamin supplements.’ She paused just long enough to light a lho-stick and suck in a long, crackling breath. ‘I even found a pack of carb-bars.’

‘I… Thanks,’ Haska said, stumbling over the unfamiliar word. She turned to hide her awkwardness, and broke open the box of carb-bars. She stuffed two of the synthetic sucrose slabs into a pocket, and after a moment’s pause put a third on the table in front of her mother.

‘Why don’t you stay here tonight?’ asked Verka. She reached out and took Haska’s hand, who flinched at the unexpected contact. ‘Please? It’s been weeks since we’ve properly seen each other. It’s going to be bloody out there.’

Haska pulled away. Her mother’s thin fingers had been so cold around her wrist, and Verka’s pleading woke the guilt that Haska tried so hard to ignore.

‘I can’t. Lira, Katryn. I’ve got people who depend on me.’ She could already imagine how Lira would react to the news.

Verka’s eyes, brown where they weren’t bloodshot, fixed on Haska’s. She drew in a breath to launch into the argument. The same damned argument they had been having for years.

But the words didn’t come. Instead the hacking started again, and this time it did not let up. Wet, choking coughs echoed around the hab, painful enough to make Verka’s arms close in against her hollow chest.

A rush of panic filled Haska, a child’s fear at seeing their mother in pain. She was torn between the urge to reach out and the need to run away. So she did nothing, standing in mute terror, until finally Verka managed to suck in a breath and not immediately lose it to the spasms that shook her.

Her mother turned away, watering eyes full of pain and shame. A streak of blood stained her lips, and smeared the inside of her cupped hand. She tried to cuff it away, but Haska had seen it.

Verka was dying. It was not the lho-sticks – although they didn’t help – but rather the inescapable end for the hundreds of Spoilers in their clave who, like Verka, spent their days bent-backed in Ludoric Erastin’s garment manufactorum. With every breath inside its low walls, Verka inhaled tiny, brittle synthweave fibres and the noxious fumes of poisonous dyes deep into her lungs. They were killing her from the inside out.

Verka’s condition was the reason Haska spent as little time as possible in her hab. It was impossible to look at her mother’s thin, wasted limbs, to listen to Verka’s wet rasps and bloody coughs, and not see her own fate playing out before her eyes. To see the same futile, inevitable end that waited for Haska if she gave in to her fear of the street-blade’s life.

Haska saw herself reach out a hand to grip her mother’s shoulder, but the crash of rapid bootsteps on the stairwell made her turn. The hand instead slipped into her pocket, and emerged gripping her knife tightly. The blade snicked from its housing with the slightest pressure.

‘Haska!’ A fist hammering against their insubstantial door accompanied the familiar voice.

Haska folded the blade away, and crossed to the door with quick steps.

Lira Starikan and Haska Jovanic looked similar enough that they sometimes passed for sisters. Lira’s eyes were a deep emerald green, whereas Haska’s were her mother’s dull brown, and Haska’s bottom lip was creased by a tiny scar from her first proper fight. But they shared the same rail-thin figure, the same olive skin, and the same sharp, determined set to their jaw.

As ever, Lira’s appearance at her door felt like a punch to the gut, making Haska’s stomach churn and her pulse flutter. She smiled, without any conscious thought or intent.

‘Have you heard?’ Lira was practically vibrating with nervous energy. Evidently her mother, another one of Erastin’s indentured workers, had brought home the news, just as Verka had. She didn’t give Haska time to reply. ‘Come on, we need to get to Lopushani’s.’

Kronstantin Lopushani was the praetor of the Pit Snakes gang, and the clave-captain who controlled their block. The Pit Snakes were the main target of Haska’s efforts to break into the Har Dhrol’s ranks. She and her crew hung around the gangers, picking up the trivial jobs that others didn’t want, taking their mockery and abuse.

Haska hated it. She hated the threat of the volatile, often stimmed-up street-soldiers, and the endless petty rivalries with other unblooded crews waiting for their chance. But she endured it for Lira’s sake. Lira, whose fearless pursuit of rank and respect would have seen her sent to the crematoria-fields without Haska’s restraining hand.

‘Haska–’ Her mother tried to make a final appeal, but the words died on her lips, lost in another bloody cough.

Haska turned back, and looked into her mother’s watery, bloodshot eyes. At the skeletal fingers that clutched the trembling lho-stick. Verka was right: there would be blood on the streets tonight. And Haska had to make sure it wasn’t her friends’.

She grasped Lira’s outstretched hand, and let herself be pulled out of the hab.

Mattix held out his hand in welcome to a woman wearing an ensemble worth more than his yearly stipend. His noble visitor looked at Mattix’s callused paw the way she might a venomous reptile, but in deference to the circumstances deigned to give it the briefest of touches. Anto, Mattix’s aide, gratefully retreated from the office as soon as he had conveyed the woman inside.

‘I am grateful for you seeing me at this late hour,’ she trilled as she lowered herself onto the very lip of a chair. The silver chains that lined her half-cloak jangled softly as she settled herself as best she could. Her outfit was a riot of pleated purple silk, which narrowed to a punishingly slim bodice then flared outwards at her shoulders. Her eyes were half hidden behind a black mesh visor, held in place by a cobweb of silver strands woven through her sable hair. The impression of unrestrained wealth was completed by a heavy gorget worn atop her dress, engraved with the stooping hawk emblem of the Foreska Dynasty.

A pink-skinned cherub accompanied her, its vat-grown child’s body held aloft by a subtle suspensor field. It bobbed beneath Mattix’s doorway behind its mistress, then set off to explore the corners of his office.

‘The night is young, mamzel.’ Mattix sank back into his own seat, which was significantly more comfortable than the one on the far side of his desk. It was a petty jape but, as Mattix often reflected, in this city you had to make your own amusement.

His visitor cleared her throat. She was evidently keen to keep her visit to the squalid pens of Bastion-D as brief as possible.

‘I hope you understand, Probator-Senioris Mattix – may I call you Thaddeus? – I hope you understand why this matter must be handled with the utmost discretion.’

‘Entirely, my dear Annunziata.’ The noblewoman wrinkled her nose at Mattix’s use of her own familiar name, but he pressed on before she could object. ‘A wayward child can be such a blight on a family’s good name.’

Lady Annunziata Lesket Foreska and Probator-Senioris Thaddeus Mattix looked at one another over the scuffed surface of his desk, each calculating how much slate would change hands before their meeting was over.

The benefits of rank gave Mattix an office to himself, one of the shallow spaces that encircled the open chamber of probators’ stations from which the noblewoman had been ushered. The room was painted in the same flaking, bilious sepia as the main hall, and the cogitator mounted on his desk was no better than that of the junior officers, but it had a door that closed, and that was worth a lot to Mattix.

Lady Foreska snapped her fingers. Her cherub attendant stopped its curious flight and bobbed over to her side. With pudgy hands, it withdrew an ornate fan from a satchel strapped around its distended belly and began to waft a rather overpowering perfume through the room. It was well into the noctis-shift, and most of the stations outside were vacant, but the level’s ancient ventilation could do little to extract the day’s accumulated heat, or the ground-in odours of sweating bodies and stale recaff.

Mattix liked to work at night – with fewer people around, it was easier for him to have conversations like the one he was sharing with the Lady Foreska.

‘You must believe that he was led astray. My family’s history in this city goes back twenty generations. There has never been a hint of disloyalty.’

Mattix held up a hand to gently stem any further protestations of innocence. ‘I assure you, I am entirely aware of all that your clan has done for the district.’ He was also aware of the jaw-dropping quantity of slate the Foreska Mercantile Association recorded on its ledgers each month. ‘But the facts being as they are, a rather unfortunate inference could be drawn from your son’s recent behaviour…’

Lord and Lady Foreska had three sons. Each of them was, in their own way, a disappointment and a liability to their noble name. But only one – Horetio, the middle child – was currently languishing in the Bastion-D gaol, on charges of sedition and distribution of inflammatory rhetoric. The severity of his crimes was such that his mother had come in person to the Bastion to plead his case. Mattix suspected Horetio’s punishment for inflicting that indignity upon the contessa would be worse than any retribution the Lex Alecto’s penal codes might exact, to say nothing of the Ecclesiarchy’s precepts on apostasy and moral hygiene. Young Horetio had been up to quite a bit of mischief.

The noble lady had not liked his threat. Her eyes narrowed to pinpricks behind her visor, and she sat, if it was possible, even straighter on the edge of his cheap, stained chair.

‘I am sure that no one possessed of any wisdom would seek to draw such an inference.’

‘Of course not.’ Mattix smiled to draw the tension from the conversation. She appeared to recognise his retreat, and granted him the briefest flash of perfect, polished teeth.

‘As I said, my son has fallen in with an unfortunate crowd. They call themselves idealists – you and I would call them fools.’ Another gleam of flawless white. Mattix wondered whether her teeth were her original set; she possessed the refined, ageless quality that was the gift of truly high-class rejuvenat treatment, and a lifestyle that rarely took her beyond her family’s estates and the most select of Dragosyl’s commercia precincts.

‘May I be honest with you, probator-senioris? The fact is, my son is not a natural leader. He was not the architect or instigator of these… incidents.’

‘Really?’ Mattix’s voice did not betray his interest, inviting the lady to play her hand.

‘If you were willing to release Horetio into my custody, I am sure that I could convince my son to provide sufficient information for you to bring the true criminals in this affair to justice.’

Lady Foreska gave her son too much credit. Mattix had instructed the Bastion’s chasteners to use only the gentlest forms of questioning, in anticipation of this encounter, but the young nobleman had already given up every one of his co-conspirators. He had gabbled out their names, renounced their dissident ideology, and pleaded for the chance to swear out a writ of testimony against them.

‘That would certainly go a long way to demonstrating your son’s desire to reform,’ said Mattix carefully. With the opening moves made, Mattix leaned forward to reach for a mug of cold recaff on his desk with a patience calculated to infuriate the noblewoman.

> Sorokin: dead.

The thin bead of text flickered into being across the top-left quarter of his vision. He barely glanced at the notification, pulled from his private dataveil node by his iris augmetic, but then the words settled in his mind. An unprompted surge of adrenaline set his heart rate racing.

‘Do you see?’ insisted Lady Foreska.

‘Please, go on,’ said Mattix, who hadn’t heard what she’d said. He reached across his desk and struck a single key on his cogitator’s built-in runeboard, and then another to open the waiting message. It was brief, just a few lines, but Mattix felt his heartbeat continue to rise.

‘Is something the matter?’ she asked after a few seconds of silence, her voice edged with irritation at his wandering attention.

‘Hmm? Oh, not at all,’ said Mattix. He stood suddenly, one hand extended towards the noblewoman. Lady Foreska rose as well, automatically matching his gesture. Mattix stepped around his desk and grasped the crook of her elbow, the touch straining the bounds of decency.

‘I am afraid I must beg your indulgence, my dear Annunziata. I shall have my novus arrange the release of young Horetio in just a few days.’ He pushed open his door and waved a hand to attract Anto’s attention, who looked up from a stack of data-wafers with a grimace.

‘But–’

‘I’m so very grateful.’ He gently but irresistibly propelled the woman from his office, her cherub burbling disapproval at such indecorous treatment.

The moment the door clattered shut on the noblewoman’s protest Mattix had forgotten her. He dropped back into his chair and cranked his cogitator’s imagifier to its full waking state, bathing his face in sickly green light.

The message was from one of his best sources in the Spoil. It was time-stamped to less than an hour ago, showing when it had first been lodged within the vast etheric network of the dataveil. The runeboard’s brass keys clattered as Mattix wrote a brief acknowledgement, along with a demand for more information as soon as it could be sent. Then he pushed back from his desk, rolling gently on his chair’s castors.

It was a single source, but one he trusted. How long would it take to arrange confirmation? Too long, most likely.

When Mattix was deep in thought he would often rub his hands together, gently rasping one thick palm over the other as his mind explored a question. He was entirely unaware of the habit, but his colleagues within the Bastion knew to leave him be whenever they saw his hands slowly working away.

The murmur of rough skin filled his office for a long minute.

Mattix closed the message, then leant across his narrow desk and picked up his vox-horn from its cradle. He frowned in impatience until the crackle of static was broken by a loud click as the operator opened his line.

‘Caller and destination.’ The servitor’s dry monotone carried poorly over the Bastion’s ancient vox-net.

‘Probator-Senioris Mattix for Castellan Hauf’s office.’

‘One moment, probator.’ The desiccated voice did not give the platitude any hint of warmth. The line fuzzed once more with static until the connection was accepted.

‘What can I do for you, probator-senioris?’ murmured Kerimov, the castellan’s long-suffering secretarius.

‘I’m coming up to see him,’ said Mattix.

‘I’m afraid that’s impossible, sir. The castellan does not have a free moment for–’

‘I assure you, he has time for this.’ Mattix placed the vox-horn back into the worn metal prongs of its cradle.

The walk from his office to Hauf’s passed unseen, a hundred possibilities playing out in his head. Fellow enforcers who greeted him received a quiet ‘His Hand’ in reply, if he bothered to reply at all. The flaking walls and tired faces went unseen because Mattix was thinking about a map, its runes and features as familiar to him as the lines of his own face.

The Spoil sat like a cancerous growth, or a knot of scar tissue, at the intersection of three districts of the city – Dragosyl, Korodilsk and Setomir. It was a neglected corner of the vast, continent-spanning immensity of Varangantua, and deliberately so; which of the neighbouring districts had once governed the Spoil was long forgotten, most likely on purpose. More pertinently, for at least two hundred years none of the district vladars had been willing to taint their fiefdoms by accepting responsibility for the sprawl of ruined manufactoria, exhausted mines, and teeming masses of destitute wretches that lurked on their borders.

Instead they had walled it up, in the case of Setomir’s great line of boundary fortifications, or else left it to fester beyond the Rustwater Canal. The city had amputated a piece of itself, severing the crumbling region like a gangrenous limb. Anyone unable to acquire the residency papers necessary to escape to the more civilised districts had been left to fend for themselves. And so the Spoil had degenerated into a lawless den of criminals and their prey, a Zone Mortalis in all but official designation.

Until Sorokin had come along. By the time Mattix joined the ranks of the enforcers, recruited straight out of scholam, the man had already established himself as the pre-eminent power inside the Spoil, and had been well on his way to crushing his few remaining rivals. But unlike the petty warlords who had come before him, Andreti Sorokin had seen the potential in the decaying ruins over which he was master.

By its nature, the Spoil was a crossroads. For those willing to hazard the attempt, it was one of the few ways to cheat the city’s strict border controls, allowing unregulated passage from one district to the other. It also lay across the Binastri Arterial, and was bounded to the east by the Rustwater, both once invaluable trade routes. These routes had been allowed to atrophy and die by the tri-districts’ merchant-combines when the city withdrew its aegis from the region, forcing costly diversions of transported goods that had broken more than a few trading collectives.

Sorokin had reached out to the merchant-combines with an offer. He would rein in the engine-gangers and road agents, most of whom were now part of the Har Dhrol in any case, and allow the slate-hungry conglomerates to reintegrate the arterials and waterways of the Spoil into their webs of logistics and trade. In exchange, he demanded a cut of all goods that made the transit. It was a simple accord, and one that paid extraordinary dividends for the cartels and collectives who were willing to deal with the King of the Har Dhrol.

The agreement had been a masterstroke. Sorokin’s power had grown, to the point that his favour had become vital for the continued commerce of the tri-districts. He was a man whose influence rivalled that of the vladars and burgraves whose offices had once left the Spoil to wrack and ruin.

Or, at least, he had been.

Mattix reached the Bastion’s executive level, glided past Kerimov, and opened the office door without knocking.

Castellan Alber Hauf was not much older than Mattix, but he wore his years far worse. Genomics had cursed them both with thinning hair, but poor judgement led Hauf to scrape his grey skeins across his balding pate, whereas Mattix’s servant shaved his scalp smooth each morning. Hauf’s growing paunch and pale, waxy complexion completed the contrast with Mattix’s tall, lean frame and dark skin.

‘Yes, Mattix, what is it?’ asked Hauf by way of welcome, trying and failing to project an air of authority upon his subordinate. Mattix had long since trained Hauf to tolerate his directness and his whims. Hauf was a political appointment, a relative by marriage of some gilded grandee who had ensured his rapid promotion through the ranks in exchange for the usual favours and discretion that were within the power of a castellan of enforcers.

Mattix did not resent Hauf for his unearned station. It was the way of things, and throughout his career Mattix had been careful to ensure that his achievements reflected just enough of their light onto his castellan that Hauf was favourably disposed towards him, despite his lack of deference.

‘Andreti Sorokin is dead,’ Mattix said quietly.

Mattix watched the reaction play across Hauf’s face. He could see the man’s thoughts, as plain as day. First surprise, then the momentary temptation to pretend that this was not news to him at all; that he was not entirely reliant on his subordinates for intelligence on the goings-on outside the walls of his office. To Hauf’s credit, he let the impulse pass, and instead allowed a conspiratorial smile to add new lines in his face.

‘Shut the door,’ said Hauf.

A pair of attendants pulled open the set of ornate doors as Tomillan Vasimov approached, in time for a loud bark of laughter to cut across the sounds of genteel conversation and the strains of a viol quartet. Without turning his head, Vasimov glanced towards its source. It was Golnarok, making an ass of himself as ever. He looked away as the burgrave gave another discordant bray of amusement.

Vasimov stepped into the ballroom, pausing to let his gaze roam across the wide chamber. Wealth met his searching stare, in all its myriad forms. The ballroom was a monument to excess, a baroque fantasy of sculpted wood and black stone. The far wall was covered with enormous mirrors in golden frames, giving the assembled nobility every opportunity to marvel at themselves and their peers. A constellation of servo-skulls circled overhead, projecting the quartet’s music along with a high-frequency privacy field.

Satisfied that there was no immediate threat, Vasimov began a slow circuit of the room’s edge.

Several hundred nobles, merchant-barons, executrices, and seniors of the city’s Administratum stood in tight clusters about the dance floor. Each was a riot of silk, lace and colour; this season’s fashion tended towards the gaudy, at least in Vasimov’s opinion. His sombre suit of black quivit wool was entirely eclipsed by the profusion of garish gowns, precarious wigs, and outlandish ruffs and collars on display.

Events such as these were a regular occurrence in the social calendar of Setomir, attracting guests of the highest strata of society from all over the city. Their frequency was due in most part to their vital role in the smooth operation of the tri-districts’ business. There were other events and other venues for those merely seeking to revel in their opulence, but these galas were places for serious people making serious decisions. At least, it would be for a few more hours; after all talk of business was concluded and the night shaded into morning, the solemn and refined conversation would inevitably slouch into a debauch fit for the grandest voyeur and wastrel among them.

Attendants, for now in various states of tasteful dress, walked between the tight knots of conversation, bearing platters of obscenely rich food and tall flutes of opalwine. No servitors were present at this function. Although their host for this evening, Lord Cherneski, and the assembled industrialists and merchant-barons could easily acquire the finest examples of the Adeptus Mechanicus’ work, the current trend in the tri-districts was for fully human servants. Vasimov heartily approved. There were no ashen-skinned automata reclaimed from humanity’s dregs to detract from the elegance and beauty on display.

Each attendant had been rigorously selected for their physical attributes, enhanced by chirurgeons where necessary. At the night’s end, the most attractive among them would be adopted as body-servants and concubines and taken away for a life of luxury and indulgence for as long as they could hold the attention of their patrons. The rest would, in all likelihood, be traded by Cherneski’s estate to one of the many flesh-purveyors who served the gilded houses, and head off to perform the same services as their more fortunate fellows but in greatly reduced comfort.

Vasimov completed his circuit of the dance floor and stopped beside two well-built men wearing sober suits of a similar, but marginally inferior, cut to his own.

‘Anything?’

Andela Nedovic, his second for this evening’s assignment, did not turn to look at him. ‘All quiet. Except for that idiot Golnarok.’

His third, Vasil Seveci, said nothing, but silently stepped back to give Vasimov the space and deference due his rank. The three securitors stood in silence, stares roving across the mingling nobility. Formally, each man was bonded to the Reisiger, an association of securitors, bodyguards and mercenaries for hire. This made them valued servants of the Valtteri cartel.

The Valtteri was the name of an idea, although that did not prevent it from having the weight and bearing of the grandest gilded house. It had begun, as far as Vasimov knew, as an alliance between a collection of industrial concerns, agri-collectives, and the banking dynasty of Datsyuk-Bartosz. Over time, the alliance had grown into one of the most successful and ruthless examples of its type, a cartel that claimed effective monopolies over entire industries across the tri-districts. Hundreds of subsidiary corporations and merchant-combines contributed to the Valtteri’s power, and guarded it from the jealous eyes and vengeful schemes of its beaten rivals.

This was Vasimov’s arena. His role and rank as a senior securitor gave him a wide remit to explore and uncover threats to the interests of Valtteri. But his first duty was to safeguard the lives of the cartel’s directors and executors, and that meant, on occasion, standing guard over a night of tense and intimate conversation, and the subsequent bacchanal.

Vasimov and his colleagues were far from alone. Other security officers and attachés stood at regular intervals around the ballroom’s edge, clustered together beneath fluted stone arches. From time to time an aide would be summoned by some coded gesture, making a discreet sally out into the milling scrum of finely attired bodies to whisper briefly in their lord or lady’s ear. Words would be exchanged, advice given or a decision noted, and then they would melt away and return to their stations.

Vasimov frowned. Several functionaries were making their way onto the floor at that very moment, and others were walking briskly away. More were sharing hushed conversations among themselves. An indefinable change in the air had taken place in the last few minutes; a new tension had settled across the assembled worthies.

He turned to Nedovic and murmured, ‘Something’s happening.’

Director Kriskoff Tomiç, the hereditary controller of the Aspiry-Tomiç Trading House and Vasimov’s principal concern for the night, reached up with an impeccably manicured hand and casually brushed his thumb down the length of his lapel. Vasimov stiffened.

‘Find out what’s going on,’ he hissed to his subordinates.

While they scurried to obey, Vasimov waited for the requisite minute, and then set out at a calm but purposeful stride, dodging between two inebriated justicii and their escorts.

He drew to a halt a few paces short of Tomiç, and clicked his heels together sharply. The old man made him wait another thirty seconds before deigning to give Vasimov his attention. Vasimov inclined his head to bring him intimately close to a man whose merest whim could alter the destiny of millions. He did not blink at the cloying odours of perfume and sour sweat that lingered around his shoulders.

Tomiç’s voice was barely louder than a breath. ‘What is happening?’ He, perhaps even more than Vasimov, was attuned to the currents of these gatherings.

‘I don’t know, sir.’ The admission hurt.

The old man looked up, giving Vasimov an instant of eye contact as sharp as the rapier concealed within his cane. ‘That is the last time I want to hear you speak those words, Tomillan.’

Vasimov did not blink at the rebuke. ‘Of course, sir. If you will permit me a moment.’ He straightened and dipped his head in a curt bow, then spun and marched off the ballroom floor.

Seveci backed away as Vasimov reached him.

‘Well?’

The man spread his hands in a gesture of ignorance. Vasimov felt the powerful urge to strike him, but checked his hand as Nedovic hurried over, his gait caught somewhere between a dignified stride and an outright run.

‘Sorokin’s dead,’ Nedovic said breathlessly.

‘What?’

‘Sub-Marshal Gutzko’s attaché has it from an agent in Dragosyl. Someone’s killed the King of the Har Dhrol.’

Vasimov couldn’t believe it. The Valtteri were the Har Dhrol’s most powerful patrons. They had been the first to see the gains to be made from an alliance with an ascendant Sorokin, and had invested considerably in his tenure at the summit of his organisation. In return, Valtteri convoys constantly traversed the Spoil, bringing vast quantities of goods from the high-intensity agri-fields and ore extractors beyond the Pans to feed the insatiable tithe demands of the tri-districts’ Administrata. The cartel’s monopoly on the Binastri Arterial passage was integral to their dominance over their rival conglomerates.

The securitor pulled a sleek data-slate from a jacket pocket and opened his message feed. A screed of text flicked into life. Vasimov scanned the feed quickly, then swore under his breath.

He turned to his aides, gripping the surface of the data-slate in a white-knuckled fist. ‘Find out where the hells Voronova is, and why I’m learning about this from Sub-Marshal Gutzko’s attaché and not from her.’ The two men almost ran to carry out his command.

Vasimov seethed. He had warned his masters repeatedly of the danger in their over-reliance on the woman Voronova. On most nights, he would have taken great pleasure in being proved right, but this failure transcended that petty instinct. Sorokin’s death had the potential to rock the Valtteri to its foundations.

The securitor took a breath to master himself. Then he returned the data-slate to his pocket, plastered his neutral servant’s expression across his angular features, and set out to inform Director Tomiç that one of his most important vassals was dead.

Vasimov considered himself to be a man of rigid self-discipline. Nevertheless, as he strode across the priceless floor, he allowed himself to utter a brief but powerful curse against the person of Melita Voronova.

Edi Kamensk released a low, impassioned curse, and hammered his fist against the heavy steel door. ‘Voronova, for Throne’s sake, are you in there?’

He waited for an answer, but did not expect one.

Night had fallen over Dragosyl many hours ago, but it was far from dark. The lumen-posts in this part of the district all worked, and a massive chameleon-screen on the roof of the opposite building blazed with advertisements, in between the mandated exhortations to duty and vigilance. Warmth radiated from the hab-tower’s brickwork, and from the crowds that thronged the street at Edi’s back. It was the dry season in the city’s equatorial reaches, and the narrow streets had soaked in the day’s heat, ensuring no respite even in the early hours of the morning.

Even without the glare of artificial light, there would be little to distinguish night from day on the fringes of Dragosyl’s expansive mercantile district. Business, like so many other things in Varangantua, did not sleep. Crowds of suited merchant-combine lackeys mingled with robed Administratum officials heading to and from their places of work, cursing the clusters of off-shift revellers that formed knots of sweat and noise outside the entrances to joy houses.

It was a night on which the sanctioners would be busy, if Edi was any judge. Which he was; for thirty-two years, Edi Kamensk had carried the seal and shock maul of the Sanctioner Corps, the arm, and more often than not the fist, of the Lex Alecto. On a night like this, the heat would make people thirsty, and the drink would make them unruly. And then it would be necessary for his former comrades to step in and return order to the streets.

Melita Voronova had her office on the ground floor of a squat tenement in the Ubrava habclave of the Dragosyl district. In similar buildings the street-level unit would be a refec-house, its walls fronted with plex and catering to the hurrying legions of stipend-men and manufactorum labourers going about their day, or a habclave overseer’s office. In this one, it was an info-broker’s lair.

Edi slammed his fist against the door once more, but there was still no reply.

With a sigh, he reached over to a discreet panel beside the door and flipped it down. Inside was a small, hollow space, with the bottom surface smoothed into a depression. A series of tiny needles, barely visible in the light of the nearest lumen-post, lined the depression.

Edi pulled off one of his gloves and pressed his thumb into the space.

Nothing happened for several seconds while the gene-lock tasted his blood, then a loud buzz crackled as the electromagnetic locks holding the door closed clicked off. Sucking his thumb, Edi pushed the sea-green steel back on its hinges.

‘Bloody hells.’

The room was in its typical state of utter disrepair. The office lumens were dark, but the light from the doorway revealed enough. The far wall was stacked high with cogitator units of every description and function. The rear of the office was dominated by a desk piled with yet more equipment, some of it disassembled. Reams of parchment and data-wafers were strewn across the floor, along with recaff mugs, discarded food wrappers and dirty clothes.

Amid the mess, Melita Voronova lay sprawled on her cot, half a dozen blisters of topaz scattered across the tangled sheets. A cotin inhaler lay in her open palm, and its cloying odour hung in the air.

Edi stepped inside, and let the door swing shut. The metal made an almighty bang as it closed, but that drew no reaction from the unconscious info-broker.

‘Melita!’ He strode over to her and clapped his hands beside her head. She stirred, but did not wake. He checked her pulse, and then the blisters of topaz; fortunately, only two had been drained. Edi flicked on a small glow-globe mounted on the wall above the cot and swept up the unused packets, each about the size of his callused thumb. He slipped them into a pocket, out of her reach.

She seemed to Edi to be very small, and very young. Her hair, lank and greasy, had fallen across her face, although it was still no more than brown fuzz on the left side of her head after the surgery. The scar that curled from her temple along the edge of her shaved hairline was raised and livid, at odds with her waxy, pallid skin. She never saw the sun; Edi had known her to go for days without leaving the cesspit of her office. Her loose shirt was tangled around her, as though she’d been thrashing in her sleep, and her tight-fitting breeches were stained and torn.

With a sigh, Edi went into the office’s tiny ablutions chamber, and returned carrying a metal bucket. Then he plucked a slim case from a pocket in his jacket, and withdrew a chromed injector.

He leant over Melita’s prone form. ‘I’m running out of patience with this,’ he said quietly. Then he jammed the injector hard into the meat of Melita’s thigh.

‘Gah!’ She lurched upright, one hand grasping her leg in pain. She looked around, surprise momentarily banishing the narcotic stupor in which she had been wallowing. She looked up at him, eyes still unfocused. ‘Edi? What the hells?’

‘Brace yourself.’

‘What–’ Then she pitched forward, retching into the pail. Weak hands tried to grasp either side of the bucket, but Edi held it stable in her lap as Melita’s body was wracked by heaving spasms. There were detoxicants that did their work more gently, but they were expensive, and Edi was a believer in direct action.

Amid the noisy convulsions, Edi felt the urge to reach out and stroke her head, but stopped himself. Theirs was not that kind of relationship.

After a while, the stream of vomit slowed. Melita coughed up a final mouthful of bile, then pushed the bucket away. After a few deep breaths, she managed to stammer out a few words.

‘For Terra’s sake… Why?’

Edi set the pail down carefully beside her cot, and knelt to look her in the eye. ‘Sorokin’s dead.’

He watched the two words filter through the remnants of topaz that still clouded her senses. After a moment’s delay, her brow furrowed, and her eyes gained a fraction of their usual hardness.

‘Shit.’

Click here to buy The King of the Spoil.

A Black Library Imprint

First published in Great Britain in 2023.
This eBook edition published in 2023 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Amir Zand.

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ISBN: 978-1-80407-442-8

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