‘Gethik…’ she slurred, still drowsy. The servitor lumbered from its alcove. ‘Show me vid from last night.’
The servitor hard-linked to a cogitator sitting on a low table, and Mabeth waited for the device to warm up. A flicking projector cast the images from the servitor’s gaping mouth onto the wall.
‘Here we go,’ she whispered as the vid-capture began to render and cycle. Then she frowned, and glared over her shoulder at Gethik. ‘I said last night.’
‘Confirmed,’ he said in a mechanised rasp, the voice coming from a vox-unit in the servitor’s neck.
‘This is everything?’
‘Confirmed.’
Her eyes narrowed, disbelieving. ‘Are you certain, Gethik?’
‘Confirmed.’
Perhaps she needed a sacristan herself. The vid units in her domicile, the ones she used to capture her artistic process for later review, had to be faulty. Blurred images filled her wall, like an overexposed pict, only in motion.
She caught snatches of… something. Mabeth drew closer as the vid continued to run, trying to see past the image flicker.
‘What in the hells…’
Not her domicile. Definitely not that. It looked like… bones.
A hard rap at the door gave her a start. She cursed loudly, rubbing her eyes from staring so intently at the image now paused on her wall. She called out, already regretting it.
‘Identify…’
It was Levio. ‘Couldn’t reach you via fonogram,’ he grumbled through the door. He sounded even more perturbed than usual.
‘So you came to my abode?’ Mabeth snapped. She dimly remembered asking Gethik to cut the fonogram shortly after she had entered. A glance at the unit confirmed it.
‘Abode?’ Levio muttered something unseemly about artists and their ilk, then added, ‘So, can I come in or do we shout at each other through your door?’
Mabeth was sorely tempted, but she gestured for Gethik to let the proctor in. He cut the image first, the wall turning blank again.
Even the sight of the proctor, dishevelled, pale, even thin… brought back the fear. He had become synonymous with it.
‘Is it him?’ she asked in a quiet voice. ‘The lavender man?’
Levio nodded, and didn’t challenge her. He had smelled it too. Fuck, that meant it wasn’t in her mind. It was something else. She chose not to comment and instead looked through a gap in her drapes at the dawning sky outside, at the strange heavens that now fell over the city. And she wondered.
‘Take me there,’ she said, sparing a glance at the paintings, and went to get dressed.
It was different this time. In every way. Not a church or a temple. No glassaic or catechisms. A woodland with an overgrown esplanade running through it. In a clearing, a body had been staked out, its limbs meticulously and perfectly bifurcated, four becoming eight, and arranged in a star shape. Pale-white flesh, painstakingly exsanguinated, shimmered like wet marble in the rain.
No sacristans this time. They had learned their lesson, that their technology had no part in this, no purchase upon whatever this was. It was just Levio and a squad of peacekeepers wearing black carapace and carrying shotguns to ward off the curious. Mabeth counted herself among them, but she had been invited beyond the electro-cordon, her servitor waiting dully some distance behind her.
‘Why?’ she asked simply.
‘Why what?’ Levio answered. ‘I’m not a damned mind-shriver, how should I know why the sick bastard is doing this?’
‘No,’ said Mabeth patiently, ‘why do you need me to illustrate this?’
‘It has to be captured. Known,’ he said. Then added more quietly, ‘Allegedly, certain parties are interested.’ He extended his middle finger so it looked like the letter ‘I’.
‘Interrogators?’
‘And worse, I expect.’ He lit a smoke; Mabeth noticed his fingers trembled. ‘Look…’ He blew out a plume. ‘If you don’t want to, I can say I couldn’t find you.’
‘Won’t your colleagues say I was here?’ Mabeth gestured to the peacekeepers on sentry duty in the distance, partly veiled by the rain. She pulled up her coat collar but it wasn’t much comfort.
‘They want rid of this as much as I do. City’s going to the hells, in case you didn’t notice.’
She’d noticed. ‘So they don’t give two shits about you.’
‘Reassuring.’
‘You know what I mean.’
Mabeth stared at the body, so cold, so… beautiful. It was immaculate in every way. The work of a true artist.
‘I want to do it,’ she said, mumbling the words.
The weather soured further as Mabeth worked, a protective sheath over the vellum to keep the ink and charcoal dry. Levio sheltered her with a parasol Mabeth had brought to the scene, his face a picture of resigned annoyance.
‘Is it a statement? Is that it?’ he asked after a while. ‘Is that what he’s doing, do you think?’
Mabeth kept illustrating, her strokes deft and assured, despite the horrific nature of her composition. ‘I thought you said I should stick to what I know, stop trying to be a peacekeeper.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Not in so many words.’
Levio grumbled his assent.
‘I don’t think it’s as random as it appears,’ said Mabeth. ‘A tree, an angel… now this.’ She paused to flex her fingers, tight after prolonged use of the charcoal stylus. ‘It’s almost as if he’s recreating something. A ritual perhaps.’
The parasol shivered as Levio tried to stifle a sudden intake of breath. He bit his lip, and kept pulling at the buttons on his storm-cloak. He needed a smoke.
‘Ever since the sky changed,’ he said at length, ‘the city changed. And us with it.’ By ‘us’, he meant Durgov’s citizens. ‘It’s always been bad here. Murder. Discord. The things people will do to each other… I’ve seen it all. But this is the first time I’ve felt such fear. Not just my own, but it’s everywhere. It’s like it slipped in through the cracks when the sky turned red and has been seeping into us ever since, in our air, our food, our bodies…’
‘What
