Principles of Angels Read Free

and spotted a group of topsiders unloading crates from a cart into the back door of a dingy building. Intent on their business, they hadn’t seen him.
     
    He doubled back and picked another route, taking him past one of the automated waste-reprocessing plants that lurked in the centre of the wedges, away from tourist eyes. The deep rumble of machinery was less of a give-away than the rotten-sweet smell drifting from inside. He looked down at a rustling by his feet; a rat sped by along the base of the building, intent on its own business.
     
    Thanks to the distraction, he didn’t see anyone step out of the door opposite the waste plant until it was too late. As soon as he registered movement he froze, and focused on the lone figure looking straight at him. He knew he should turn round and get out of there, but he couldn’t run for long in this gravity. Besides, they might not be alone.
     
    Then he recognised the person blocking the alley.
     
    The man had a fleshy, almost jovial face, and no hair on his head other than girl-thin eyebrows. He wore a narrow-brimmed black hat and an improbably smart but unfashionably cut dark grey suit. He was as short as a topsider, and a little porky, but this was no ordinary cove. There was only one person in the world who looked like that, and though Taro had never met him, he had heard the description enough times. He was looking at the most powerful man in the City: the Minister, the head of the Kheshi League of Concord.
     
    Taro stepped forward, crossed his wrists over his chest and bent his head, the downsider gesture of submission and respect.
     
    The man approached. ‘ Taro sanMalia?’
     
    ‘Me life is yours, sirrah,’ he croaked. The Minister had called him Taro sanMalia, though he no longer had a right to that name; Malia had been his aunt, not his birth-mother, and though she had adopted him, with her death his lineage name should revert back to his dead mother’s. Was it possible that the master of the Angels didn’t know that one of his agents was dead?
     
    ‘Your life? Indeed it is,’ the Minister replied. ‘But all I require is your service. I wish you to witness a removal.’
     
    ‘Witness a removal? Aye, sirrah - to make sure it’s legal?’ By the rules of the Concord there needed to be ten witnesses, but they weren’t usually downsiders. Removals were topside business, and the witnesses were most often tourists; that was what a lot of the rollers came here for. Taro was not sure why the Minister wanted him.
     
    ‘There will be plenty of people watching the mark. I want you to watch the Angel. Or rather, to report on her performance and when she returns to the Undertow, to follow up on her movements down there. Do you think you can manage that?’
     
    Taro’s head was reeling. He couldn’t believe he was here, having this conversation. After three days of hell, he was standing in a topside alley being given his first mission by the Minister, who knew nothing of Malia’s fate.
     
    He said the only thing he could. ‘Aye, sirrah. I’ll do me best to serve you an’ me City.’
     
    ‘Good. The Angel in question is Nual. I expect you’ll need to do some research.’
     
    Though any personal fame among the Angels was discouraged by the Minister, who preferred them to be held in awe and viewed from afar, Taro knew the names of all thirty-three Angels currently in the service of the City. He searched his memory for some fact about the Angel Nual, to show the Minister he knew his stuff.
     
    ‘She lives under the Merchant Quarter, don’t she?’ he asked after a short pause.
     
    The Minister nodded, waiting for Taro to continue.
     
    ‘An’ . . . I don’t think she’s a pureblood downsider.’
     
    The Minister gave the ghost of a smile. ‘You could say that. Nual is scheduled to remove Salik Vidoran, Second Undersecretary for Offworld Trade, in Confederacy Square later this morning. I expect she will take the shot from a vantage point beyond