We got everything aboard – the items we had rescued from my study, the runestaff, all of it – and secured Medea in a pull-down cot in the aft of the speeder's crew bay. Then I got into the pilot's seat and, once I'd made sense of the control layout, got us airborne.
I edged up just above the treetops, running unlit. The moon was up and the night was clear, apart from a brown smudge against the stars away to the north. The smoke from my burning estate, I had no doubt. There was no sign of anything else in the air. Hugging the tips of the trees, I turned us south.
Once we were underway, I checked out the cockpit. It was clearly an ex-military flier, bought for the purpose in my opinion. Insignia mouldings had been chiselled off, service numbers erased with acid swabs. Apart from the basic controls, the cabin was provided with several socket racks where optional instrument modules could be bolted in. Only a vox-set had been fitted. There were gaps where an auspex, a terrain-reader and night vision displays might have gone, and also slots for a navigation cod-ifier and a remote fire control system that would have slaved the door weapon to the pilot and done away with the necessity of a separate gunner. Whoever had supplied the mercenaries with their vehicles had provided only the most basic package. An armed troop-lifter with an old model vox-caster comm. No automated systems. No clue to origin or source.
But it had decent power and range – over a thousand kilometres left in it before it would need a recharge. Something to get them in, lay down cover and get them out again.
The forest flickered by beneath us. The vox burbled intermittently, but I had no idea of the codes or cant they were using, and little desire to let anyone know the flier was still operational.
After a while, it shut off. 1 unplugged it, pulled it out of its rack and told Eleena to toss it overboard.
'Why?' she asked.
'I don't want to risk it having a tracker or transponder built into it.'
She nodded.
I tried to get our bearings manually, using the basic instrumentation, working to reconstruct a map of the area in my head. It was pretty much guesswork. Dorsay, the nearest main city, was perhaps a hour west of us now, but given the scale of the operation mounted against me, I felt going there would be like flying into a carnodon's den.
There were small fishing communities and harbour towns on the east side of the Insume headland, the closest now more than two hours away. Madua, a chapel town in the south-east, was in range. So was Entreve, a market city on the fringe of the wild woodland. So were the Atenate Mountains.
I thought about calling the arbites on the vox, but decided against it. The attack on Spaeton House must surely have been noted by sentries at Dor-say, especially once the main fires started, but no emergency support units had come. Had the arbites been paid to turn a blind eye? Had they been more complicit still in the raid?
Until I understood who and what my enemies were, I could trust no one, and that included the authorities and even the Inquisition itself.
Not for the first time in my life, I was effectively alone.
I headed for the mountains. For Ravello.
Ravello is a hill town in the flanks of the western Atenates, situated at the foot of the Insa Pass, on the shores of a long freshwater lake that forms the headwaters of the great Drunner. It has a small but distinguished univer-sitariate specialising in medicine and philology, a brewery that exports its lake-water ale all over Gudrun, and a fine chapel dedicated to Saint Cal-wun, which houses to my mind some of the best religious frescoes in the sub-sector.
It is a quiet place, steep and densely packed, its old buildings lining narrow hill streets so tightly their green copper roofs overlap like plate armour. From the air, it looked like a patch of dark moss clinging to the blue slopes of the Itervalle.
The sun was rising as we approached from the north. The air was clear, a baking blue. We had left the wild woodland in the first touches of dawn, and climbed up into the foothills, following the line of the Atenate Minors up into the higher altitudes. The Itervalle was high enough to have cloud cover round its peak, but across the lake, the first of the great giants rose: Esembo, ragged like a tooth; Mons Fulco, a violet triangle stabbing the sky; snow-capped Corvachio, the sport and bane of recreational climbers.
We were nearly out of power and the speeder was getting sluggish. I dropped us to road level and came in through the western gate. There were no traffic and no pedestrians. It was still early in the morning.
The streets were paved with the same blue-grey ouslite that the buildings were constructed from, bright in the sunlight, dank in the shadows of the narrow streets. We passed through a square where a student lay sleeping off a night's drinking on the lip of a small fountain, along a wider avenue where ground cars and civilian fliers were parked in a herringbone, and then turned up a narrow street and climbed the hill out of the glare of the sun. I opened the speeder's windows and breathed in the fresh, clear air. The muted sounds of the flier's engines washed back at me, reflected oddly by the tall, shuttered faces of the dwellings on either side of the steep, paved lane.
It had been a long time, but I still knew my way around.
We parked in a cul-de-sac alley just off the lane, little more than a blunt courtyard where a mountain spurra struggled to grow against the face of a wall. The spurra, or at least its little yellow spring flowers, was the emblem of Saint Calwun, and votive bottles and coins littered the little stone basin the tree was growing from.
A first floor shutter twitched at the sound of our engines, and I was glad I had asked Aemos to stow the door gun during our flight. At least we resembled a private transport.
'Stay here,' I told Eleena and Aemos. 'Stay here and wait.'
I walked back down the street in the quiet morning. I was still wearing the boots, breeches, shirt and leather coat I had put on before the auto-seance the night before, but Aemos had lent me his drab-green cloak. I made sure I was displaying no insignia or badge of office, except my signet ring, which would pass notice. Medea's autopistol, reloaded with shells from a box magazine we found on the speeder, was tucked into the back of my belt.
A stray dog, coming up from the town centre towards me, paused to sniff my cloak hem and then trotted on its way, uninterested.
The house was as I remembered it, halfway down the lane. We had passed it on the way up, and now I made certain. Four storeys, with a terrace balcony at the top under the eaves of the copper-tiled roof. The windows were shuttered and the main entrance, a pair of heavy panelled wooden doors painted glossy red, were bolted shut.
There was no bell. I remembered that. I knocked once and waited.
I waited a long time.
Finally, I heard a thump behind the doors and an eyeslit opened.
'What is your business so early?' asked an old man's voice.
'I want to see Doctor Berschilde.'
'Who is calling?'
'Please let me in and I will discuss it with the doctor.'
'It is early!' the voice protested.
I raised my hand and held my signet ring out so its design was visible through the eyeslit.
'Please/1 repeated.
The slit shut, there was a rattle of keys and then one of the doors opened into the street. Inside was just shadow.
I stepped into the delicious cool of the hall, my eyes growing accustomed to the gloom. A hunched old man in black closed the door behind me.
'Wait here, sir/ he said and shuffled away.
The floor was polished marble mosaic that sparkled where scraps of exterior
