"Dark, bizarre, and dangerous as hell..."

Zefer Tyranus is an inquisitive man and an able administrator. His family has been in the service of the Noble House Ko'iron for generations, acting as curators, record keepers and occasionally spies for the famed scholars and poets of that glorious house. His position affords him residence in an exclusive zone of the industrial nightmare-world of Hive Primus known as the Spire. He lives enveloped in luxury right next to the glittering walls of the ruling House of Helmawr itself.

However, Zefer's comfortable world is turned upside-down when he hears tales of an ancient artefact that could possibly link House Ko'iron to the founding fathers of the Spire and Hive Primus -- placing the noble house as one of the very first to dig into the now-toxic soil of Necromunda. Sent down through the hive city on a dangerous mission to retrieve the rumoured artefact, Zefer must learn the hard way that the confusing, bizarre and violent Underhive is no place for a bumbling curator...

(2005)

(cover art: Clint Langley)

Reviews:

5 STARS! AWESOME SCI-FI!!!, June 5, 2005

Reviewer: Horatio (Paris, France)

This book is a real treat. It is intelligent and tense, twisted and violent, cunning and tragic. It reminds me of Kafka, only in space, with a bit of Logan's Run thrown in! The writing is gripping and the story extremely well paced.
The story takes the main characters all the way through the world of Necromunda, exploring all its different parts and showing just how bizarre the hive city really is. If the rest of the Necromunda titles are going to be this good, I can't wait for them to appear.
Fantastic -- check it out!

5 STARS! BL literature?!, December 1, 2005

Reviewer: Alchemist (London)

This book was a complete shock to the system. I`ve read dozens of BL books in the past, usually ramming them into my eyes on the subway as a deliriously brutal enhancement to the journey across London. There`s not usually much to think about, and there`s always lots of blood to enjoy. That`s the whole point, right? This book, however, this book is actually ... a NOVEL! I had to check the cover a few times to make sure that it was really a BL book. The character development is awesome, the writing is fantastic, and the story works on so many levels that I have been thinking about it for weeks after finishing it. All of this without skimping on the blood, and there are even a bunch of laughs thrown in for good measure. If this is the wave of the future for BL fiction, bring it on! If you haven`t read it, you should ... but you shouldn`t expect it to be like the rest of the BL catalogue.

Extract:

From pp.7-15:

Everything is built on something else –

What shoulders the burden of elsething?

Glory rests wholly on the Undying Emperor

(or elsewhere only if strictly necessary).

Praise the Emperor for the heights of Ko’iron.

For it is better to be well defined at the top

Than lost in the paradoxes of foundations –

unless it isn’t.

(From Paradoxes of the Spire)

Anything could have happened and he wouldn’t have noticed. He was not an observant man at the best of times, even when his nose was not pressed deeply into the glue-cracked spine of an ancient tome. He read with his whole being, always sniffing each page before he read it, hunching over his desk and pushing his face close to the parchment, as though certain that he could inhale some of the original intent that the author had been unable to transliterate into the orderly etchings of script. When his lungs rattled with the forgotten damp of the paper, he would raise his head and sigh, nodding slightly in appreciation. Smoothing the pages flat with his pale hands, he would begin to read, before commencing the ritual again on the next page.

Zefer’s desk was tucked away on the seventy-third floor of the Ko’iron librarium. He called it his desk because he sat at it every night and read for three hours exactly. In the four and three-quarter years that he had been permitted access to the higher levels of the librarium, he had never once seen another curator sitting at that desk. Hence, he reasoned, it was as good as his. Every ninth evening, he would carefully place his stylus into an ostensibly careless position on the desk and leave it there overnight. On those nights he would not be able to sleep, and he would sit on the edge of his bed wringing his hands in anxious excitement. Nothing could match his sense of satisfaction and relief when he saw it there, unmoved, the next day. It was his desk.

In his most audacious moments, Zefer might even refer to the seventy-third floor as his floor, since he was invariably the only person there. He never actually said those words out loud: my floor. But they echoed around his head in the hours of late afternoon, before he was released from his duties in the lower levels of the librarium. Once, caught up in the euphoric regression of whispers in his mind, Zefer had even moved his desk to the end of another book stack, feeling his power over the floor growing with each scrape of the table leg on the flagstones. In the end, his resolve had cracked and he had run back to the librarium in the middle of the night and replaced the desk in its original position, cleaning the scratches off the floor with saliva and the cuffs of his robe.

The book smelt like cold vegetable soup, and its pages were slightly damp with his breath in the frosty night air. Zefer traced his finger along each line of text as he read, letting its slender, flickering shadow dance in the candlelight, nodding slightly at points that made sense to him and screwing up his forehead when things made no sense at all. It was the Paradoxes of the Spire, so his face was a perpetual lattice of cracked ice.

Over the last few months, Zefer had made it nearly halfway through the ancient tome. As far as he knew, this was the furthest that anyone in his generation had managed to get. The text was tortuously convoluted and riddled with mysterious allusions that were wasted on the normal reader. It was not exactly a heavy book – indeed the poetic style was faintly ridiculous – but it was dense and deceptively impenetrable. It was the opposite of a labyrinth: impossible to get into, but easy to get out of. Most people simply gave up on it after its famous introduction:

In the beginning they lay the end into the ground,

And the finale was buried beneath the foundations,

As though expecting the sky to fall into the abyss

In the days of Ko’iron’s salvation to come.

The book stacks of level seventy-three were overflowing with commentaries written by renowned scholars, many of them focussed exclusively on those first four lines. Zefer had read them all and, on reflection, it seemed fairly clear that even the most erudite and wise of House Ko’iron had not made it beyond those muddy introductory lines. Zefer had read all of the commentaries before he even picked up the Paradoxes, thinking that he should approach the original text with as much rhetorical ammunition as possible. That was why it had taken four years before he had even opened the hallowed book itself, and why he had read the first four lines over and over again every day for three months, experimenting with various interpretations and test-driving the theories of the past masters.

He was not sure that he had produced any great or innovative insights, but he had made careful note of his thoughts in a little book of his own, his book. Sometimes, on his long, lonely walk home through the gently twisting streets of the Spire, Zefer would fantasise that his son would stumble across his book at the end of stack 4.73.2176b. There were one or two things that needed to be done before this particular fantasy could come true: Zefer needed to write the book, and he needed to have a son. He wasn’t confident that either condition would be satisfied in the near future.

After he had got through the complicated web of the first four lines, progress had been much smoother. Indeed, he had covered more than five hundred lines in just over two months. He was relatively sure that the speed was because he wasn’t paying as much attention, but part of him remained confident that he had gained an important foothold in the text in the first few lines, and that the rest built logically upon those foundations. In fact, those first lines made more and more sense as he read further and further into the book.

Turning the page deliberately, Zefer ducked his nose down into the exposed inner-spine and inhaled deeply. Sighing slightly, he pressed the new pages flat and started to read. Then he stopped. He flicked back to the previous page and read the last line again.

Though it may be lost, salvation is always found

Turning back to the new page, he read the first line.

When you look up, there is nothing but the sky.

He sniffed again, picking the book off the surface of his desk and squashing it against his face. The new page smelt different, as though the chef had forgotten to add salt to the soup.

Stretching out his arms, he held the book in front of him, balancing it precariously on the palm of his left hand. With his right, he turned the problematic page backwards and forwards in front of the candlelight, feeling its pendulous shadow swinging across his face as he squinted at the movement of the parchment. He pressed down slightly on the edge of the paper with his right index-finger and the shadow split into two vertical stripes, with the candlelight burning brightly straight through the middle.

In shock and excitement, Zefer snatched his hands back and the book clattered down to the desk, its heavy leather covers snapping shut. Pushing his seat back from the desk, Zefer jumped to his feet and took a couple of paces towards the exit. Almost immediately, he stopped, changing his mind, and turned back to the desk, wringing his hands with indecisive anxiety. The Paradoxes of the Spire lay solidly on the small writing-desk, unmoving and unconcerned by all the commotion. Zefer stared at it.

Slowly and hesitantly, as though stalking a terrible enemy, Zefer shuffled back towards the book, fixing his eyes on the faded gold lettering on its atrophied leather binding. The yellow candle light burst into periodic reflections, luring him back to the desk with the flickering promise of riches and wisdom.

He picked his chair off the ground, standing it back onto its legs in front of the desk, and sat down, breathing evenly to calm his nerves. The book seemed to look back at him, implacable with the confidence of unspoken ages, and he shivered slightly, as though caught in the glance of a ghost.

Taking a deep breath and exhaling loudly, Zefer flipped open the front cover to the frontispiece with its elegant illumination of Hive Primus – the capital of Necromunda. Never having been outside of the huge hive city, Zefer always paused in wonderment at this picture. He looked at the contorted and vaguely conical structure, pushing up from the crumpled remains of the underhive. It rose erratically from the barren wastelands of the surrounding planes to a height of about ten miles, slicing through the permanent layer of lethally poisonous, yellowing and noxious undercloud at about three miles, created by the continuously vomiting factories of Necromunda. Then, at the five mile mark, there was the layer of natural cloud, thick and billowing, as the heavier toxins rained down into the underlayer leaving only the relatively clean, acidic water vapour congealing into a thick cumulus belt. And high above that, aspiring to the heavens, was the majestic spire of House Helmawr – the hereditary lords of Hive Primus and guardians of all Necromunda. The hive was surprisingly beautiful, thought Zefer, each time he looked at it.

Out of habit, Zefer glanced over his shoulder towards the reinforced window cut into the thick exterior walls of the librarium. At night, he could see nothing out there at all, except for the faint glow of millions of lights refracted through the thick vapour. During the day, the view was only slightly better: swirling and eddying cloud sweeping past the glass and smudging it with moisture.

He shook his head at the marvel of the structure in which in sat, and at the glory of Ko’iron that it represented. The great Ko’iron librarium was a tower of more than one hundred levels; at unbelievable expense, it had been built on one of the exterior walls of Hive Primus, five point two miles from the underhive. The founders of the great House had insisted that its curators should be granted the extraordinary privilege of natural light by which to study the history and glory of Ko’iron over the generations to come. Hence, the librarium protruded like a thorn from the side of the Spire, the windows of three sides pointing out into Necromunda’s vaporous atmosphere and the fourth connected by a web of bridges and walkways back into the Spire itself.

In fact, the Ko’iron curators enjoyed almost no natural light at all. The House Ko’iron architects had overlooked the fact that this altitude was perpetually enshrouded by the natural cloud belt. When the local star was at its peak, just after noon , a thin yellow light filtered through the thick clouds – but it was certainly not enough to read by. In any case, most of the curators would be on their lunch-breaks at that time. Unfortunately, the architects had been so stubborn about the potential wonders of natural light that they had neglected to install sufficient interior lighting – thus, like the other curators in the librarium, Zefer had to carry a supply of candles with him at all times. Rather than producing the most magnificent librarium in the Spire, bathed in the splendour of natural light, House Ko’iron actually boasted the darkest and dingiest librarium out of all the Spire’s great Houses.

As usual, Zefer ran his finger over the cloud line etched into the frontispiece, tracing the contours of the voluminous vapour trail. He knew that the librarium was hidden behind that layer, but it was the first paradox of the Paradoxes of the Spire that the Ko’iron librarium was hidden from view in the frontispiece of one of its most famous tomes.

He flicked through the pages of the ancient book, searching for the lines that had caused him such consternation. Finally, after a few minutes of flicking and sniffing, Zefer found the page: …though it may be lost, salvation is always found

It didn’t even end with a full-stop. And the first line on the next page was a clear non-sequitur: When you look up, there is nothing but the sky. For a few more moments Zefer wondered whether this was really a non-sequitur, or whether it was simply a characteristic, stylistic device. In the end, it was the missing full-stop and the odd smell of the following page that proved decisive. He held the book up to the light once more, flipping the page in question vertically against the candle. He delicately pressed the page with his index finger until it buckled: just as before, it split into two. He pushed his finger in between the pages and tugged it up against the top edge, but the pages were still uncut and thus connected together as a single, folded sheet.

This time Zefer was ready for the wave of excitement that gushed over him as he realised what he had found, and he laid the book carefully back onto his desk. He looked nervously over each shoulder, as though suspicious that this would be the first night in nearly five years that there would be someone else on the seventy-third floor, watching him. He couldn’t see anyone, but it was almost completely dark beyond the reach of the candlelight, so there might have been an entire troop of Delaque spies waiting in the shadows for all he knew.

Picking up his stylus, he slipped it between the uncut pages and tugged gently, watching the folded edge separate and tear a fraction. He checked back over his shoulders again, paranoia trickling down his spine like a droplet of icy water. Another slight flick with his stylus and the crease ripped nearly half way along, revealing the lost pages where the missing full-stop suggested that they would be. With a final, nervous thrust, he sliced the pages open and instantly stuffed his nose down into the new pages, inhaling deeply. They smelt unlike any pages he had ever smelt before; they smelt … untouched.

Zefer pressed the hidden pages flat with his hands and sighed loudly, letting the intoxicating scent of the unblemished paper escape from his lungs at last. Nobody had ever read these pages before. Nobody. Not since the book was written, thousands of years before, had anyone seen these words. Zefer was so excited that he could hardly bring himself to lower his eyes to the page. Instead, he glanced down at the timepiece on his wrist and realised that he had been at his desk for three hours and seven minutes. Seven whole minutes more than usual; his five year routine shattered by a few moments of lost concentration. In mild panic, he checked back over both shoulders once again, suddenly fretting that somebody might be witness to his incompetent time-keeping.

Snapping shut the Paradoxes of the Spire, Zefer placed his stylus carefully onto its cover, diagonally across the top left-hand corner, and then he hurried out of the librarium, flustered and conscious that his routine had been broken.

(copyright Games Workshop ltd, 2005 -- CS Goto)