They tried to kill him.
Under the pretence of a quiet sale, three genestock migou drew him apart from the main camp, and led him to a rock pasture where fire stone and cacholong spoil had been heaped up by porter gangs. They unwrapped a cloth roll with slices of brown resin in it to show him. Then one drew a punch-dagger and tried to insert it into his liver.
He sighed – a complication.
He took hold of the migou’s wrist, folded the arm around and broke it against itself with his elbow. The joint went the wrong way, and the arm went so slack, he simply peeled the punch-dagger out of the dead fingers. The genestock uttered no expression of pain. He simply blinked in surprise.
All three of them were titanic creatures, corded and slabby with unnatural, hard-cut muscle definition. It had not occurred to any of them that the Caucasian, though extremely large and well made, would offer them a moment’s problem.
One threw a punch, a blow driven with huge force but desultory effort, as if he was aggrieved that they should be put to such trouble. The punch was designed to finish matters, to put the Caucasian down, his jaw pulped, his head slack on the column of his spine.
The blow did not connect with any part of the Caucasian. Instead, it encountered the punch-dagger, which had suddenly been angled to face it. The impact shaved flesh and muscle away from bone. This produced a pain response. The genestock howled, and tried to gather in his shredded hand and forearm. The Caucasian shut him up by jabbing the punch-dagger into his heavy forehead. It cracked in through the bone like the tip of a rock-breaker’s pick.
The genestock toppled backwards, wearing the grip of the punch-dagger above his eyes like some curious tiara.
The third migou grabbed him from behind in an ursine hug. The genestock with the broken arm tried to claw at his face. It was all tiresome now. He broke free of the embrace with a shrug of his shoulders, turned and drove his right hand into the genestock’s chest. The sternum split. When the Caucasian wrenched his hand out again, it looked as if it was wearing a red glove. Most of the migou’s heart was clenched in his steaming fist.
The genestock with the broken arm, now the only one of the trio left alive, murmured in fear and started to run away across the rock pasture.
He bore the wounded genestock no especial malice, but he couldn’t let him go. With bloody fingers, he bent down, selected a small piece of fire stone, weighed it in his hand and launched it with a snap of his wrist.
It made a pokk! noise as it penetrated the back of the fleeing ogre’s head like a bullet. He fell heavily, and his hefty corpse slithered down the litter of a spoil heap on its face.
He disposed of the three bodies in a fathomless gorge, washed his hands with snow and took the roll of qash resin.
The confluence of workers gathered around the skirts of the Palace had brought, as any great body of humanity always did, lice and vermin and scavengers with it. Rad-wolves had followed the workers down off the plateau, and gathered at night, red eyes in the dark catching the flicker of the campfire rings. Thousands of war hounds patrolled the camp perimeters at night, or lingered on the escarpments before the Palace. The night was regularly interrupted by sudden gales of howling and barking, the growl and shiver of animals mauling one another as the faithful hounds drove off wolves that had become too inquisitive.
In the darkness, it was hard to tell the difference between hounds and wolves.
He had received regular physiological testing his entire life, and he had memorised all the results in forensic detail so as to best judge his limitations.
He cut the qash resin into sample measures, weighing each on a set of fine scales that he’d borrowed from a gem cutter.
The reinforcement of the Annapurna Gate was half done. Every day, the mouth of the huge gate bustled with thousands of labourers, and the towering hoist cranes swung cradles of ceramite plating, rebar and reinforced rockcrete up over the cyclopean arch. It was too intensive a task for the sentries to scan each labourer in and out individually: the labour gangs would snarl up, and the work would run slow. Instead, the entire gate zone was covered by a biometric reader field, projected by slowly rotating vanes in the eaves of the primary arch.
At dawn, he secured himself under the tarps of one of the payloads due to be taken in over the gate by hoist crane. He huddled down between sheets of mule steel and bundles of ironwood.
He had prepared a four-gram dose of qash, an overdose by migou standards. Its efficacy was such, he would be insensible less than a minute after ingesting it.
He waited for two hours until he felt the jolt of the lift crews securing the payload’s chains. He heard the steel cables of the hoist crane whining. He felt the heavy sway as the pallet he was hiding on left the ground.
He swallowed the qash.
Observation had shown him that it took the hoist crane mechanism forty-three seconds to bring a payload up to clearance height, and a further sixty-six seconds to traverse it in over the gate top. Twenty-four seconds into that second time period, the moving payload would enter the biometric reader field.
The qash did its work. He was stiff and dead twelve seconds before he entered the field. The field read nothing except a payload of inert building materials.
He woke. The pallet had set down, and some of the tarps had been pulled back. Riggers and roof-gangers were beginning to unload the mule steel.
His body ached. Most of his muscles were cramping. He focused and performed some purging exercises to throw off the vestiges of the somatic rigour that the qash had induced. Death to most mortal men, near-death to a being like him; a brief, death-like fugue to allow him to slip in through the Palace biometrics.
He slid off the pallet, sore and woozy. Enormous gunboxes and shielded fighting platforms were being constructed around the upper ramparts, and thick dura-plating and adamantium were being bonded to the walls. Workers milled around on scaffolds and gantries, some suspended like mountaineers over the edge of the wall’s sheer drop. The air was filled with noises of hammering and cutting. Powered tools shrilled. Fusion torches buzzed and flickered with arctic blue light.
Phantoms fought behind his eyes, the ghost flares of fusion cutters. There was blood in his throat. He scooped up a box of rivets and a concussion mallet, and blended with the workforce.
He penetrated the outer levels of the Palace. This process took a further three days. He stopped being a masonic labourer and became a shadow, then a footman polishing brasswork, then a lamp-lighter with a spark-pole, and then a doorkeeper, wearing a livery he had purloined from a laundry room and a concealed displacer field to disguise his height and bulk.
He followed hallways that were dressed in diaspore and agate, and descended stairwells planed from solid pieces of onyx. He watched his reflection cross polished marble floors, and his shadow chase along walls carved from quartz and sardonyx. He waited in the ivory gloom of huge processionals while warbands passed by in marching time. He lingered in doorways while almost endless trains of servitors brought past trays of raw meats and hydroponic vegetables for the high table.
He became a footman again, then a carpet beater, then a beadle, and then a messenger man with an attaché box full of blank papers, hunching to disguise his build and height. Every once in a while, he stopped to get his bearings. The Palace was bigger than many cities. Its levels and byways took a lifetime to learn. From the rails of high balconies, he looked down into artificial ravines five hundred storeys deep, filled with lights and teeming with people. Some of the great domes in the Precinct, especially the Hegemon, were so vast, they contained their own miniature weather systems. Microclimate clouds drifted under painted vaults. Rain in the Hegemon was said to be a portent of good fortune.