Excerpted from ‘
by Cyrene Valantion
Part Three
CRIMSON
Forty years later
TWENTY
Three Talents
A New Crusade
The Crimson Lord
Ishaq Kadeen was immensely proud of himself, for he did three things in life with a skill few others could match. These three talents had earned him enough coins to rub together, no doubt there, but they’d also elevated him from the depths of poverty that had swallowed his parents – and getting out of those slums was something far out of reach for most of the beggars and street-folk in his home city.
Three talents. That’s all it took.
And they weren’t even that hard. If he’d needed to practise them, then it might have been a different story. Ishaq Kadeen was one of those naturally lucky souls that live their lives in the moment. He never spared a thought for getting old, never saved money with any great care, and never worried overmuch what the enforcer patrol around the next street corner might have to say about his activities.
Three talents got him through life, pitching him in and out of trouble.
The first was to run, which was a skill he’d honed by putting it to good use in the criminal-infested lower sprawls of Sudasia’s primary hive city.
The second was to smile with a vicious blending of charm, smarm and intimacy, which had variously gotten him into several lines of employment, out of an entirely legal execution that he’d absolutely deserved, and even once into the fine, black lace underwear of a countess’s younger cousin – the night of the gala held to celebrate her coming of age.
The third talent, which was what had gotten him posted to his current situation in the first place, was the fact he could take a wicked pict when he wanted to.
Not a day passed that Ishaq didn’t think back to the conversation that damned him out here onto the fringes of space. He’d been sitting in an austere office, absently picking dirt from beneath his nails while a robed hierarch in the Remembrancer Order droned on and on about ‘noble goals’ and the ‘very real need’ to record the present for future generations to study in excruciating detail.
‘It is the greatest honour,’ the stern gentleman insisted.
‘Oh, I know.’ Ishaq started to bite his nails now they were clean. ‘The greatest.’
The older man seemed dubious. Ishaq thought he looked like a vulture disapproving of a potential meal, largely because it was still alive.
‘Thousands of archivists, sculptors, painters, pictographers, poets, playwrights have been sent. Tens of thousands have been rejected for lacking the thoroughness and flair that the Great Crusade deserves in its remembrancers.’
Ishaq made a noncommittal noise to encourage the hierarch to continue, while secretly musing over the number of artistic professions beginning with the letter “P”.
‘So you see, to be chosen like this... You have to understand how fortunate you are.’
‘What about puppeteers?’ Ishaq asked.
‘I... what?’
‘Nothing. Never mind.’
‘Yes, well. I’m sure you can appreciate the gravity of the situation.’ The hierarch did his vulture-sneer again. Ishaq smiled back – his eyes brightened; a faint movement of his eyebrows suggested something delightfully wry; and a calculatedly cocksure amount of teeth were on display for a predatory moment – but the hierarch was neither female nor attracted to males, and that disinterest rather disarmed Ishaq’s best weapon.
‘Mr. Kadeen?’ the man said. ‘Are you taking this seriously? Do you wish to be shipped to Mars to end your years as a servitor?’
He really didn’t. If it came to a choice between paying for his crimes in the traditional manner or catching a transport ship halfway across the galaxy to serve as a remembrancer... Well, it wasn’t much of a choice at all. He wasn’t going to spend his life lobotomised into penal service.
So he assured the remembrancer hierarch that he was taking it very seriously indeed. Over the following two hours, he weaved a compelling fiction of interstellar ambition and an exploratory spirit that had suffered in the strangling confines of his birth-slums. Now, at last, he would be free to walk the stars, to gaze upon new suns, to chronicle the advance of mankind, to...
To lie through his teeth.
Ishaq, at thirty-five, was not an educated man, and he was fairly certain at several points he invented new words or mispronounced ones he’d only read before, but it did the trick. Three days later, his intermittent work as an imagist for almost-wealthy hive families and crime scene pictography was behind him – as was Terra itself and the shit-heap hive in which he’d been born.
Was it an honour, really? That all depended upon just where you were sent.
In the briefings, Ishaq had been hoping against hope for a posting that would actually mean something. While
