War Without End Read online

  ‘Then why are they doing this?’ said Vesper, her face puffy with tears. ‘Why did they take my sister? They’re hurting her now, I can feel it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Vivyen, slipping the book from her dress. ‘There’s a story in here about an evil mirror that gets broken into tiny fragments, and when someone gets a bit of its glass in their eye or their heart they can only see bad things and feel bad things.’

  ‘Do you think these men have glass in their hearts and eyes?’

  Vivyen felt tears prick her eyes.

  ‘I think they must have.’

  Lalique chewed her bottom lip and said, ‘Any stories in there about bad people getting what’s coming to them?’

  ‘It’s not really that kind of book,’ said Vivyen, turning its crumpled pages.

  ‘What’s that one?’ asked Oskar. ‘She looks pretty fierce.’

  Vivyen looked down at the book, her eyes widening at the ink-etched woodcut picture. She read the name beneath the picture, and her brows furrowed in amazement. ‘I haven’t seen that one before, but it looks like–’

  Before she could say any more, the cell door burst open and six figures robed in white entered. One for every child. Like the one who’d taken Challis, their skin was burned and their lips were stained purple.

  Vesper and Ivalee shouted at them. Oskar put his arms around Uriah as Lalique stood up with her fists balled at her side. Vivyen cried out as the first man into the meat locker quickly hoisted Lalique onto his shoulders with the ease of a man used to hefting dead weight. A second man grabbed Oskar, who howled and punched like a dervish. A third dragged Uriah’s wounded body as a woman with darting, bloodshot eyes took Ivalee’s hand. The girl didn’t make a sound as she was led away.

  Vesper was lifted screaming onto a man’s shoulders, while the one who had taken Challis advanced on Vivyen.

  She backed into the corner of the room, holding her book across her chest. She’d been afraid of this man before, but not any more. She hated him, but her fear was gone, displaced by faith in someone she knew would risk anything to save her.

  ‘Going to try and hurt me, girl?’ he asked. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth and his eyes were veined with pink threads.

  ‘No,’ said Vivyen. ‘I’m not, but I know who will.’

  ‘Oh?’ said the man. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘She will,’ said Vivyen, holding out her book and letting him see the picture of the woman and her enormous pistol with the white serpents curling around the barrel.

  ‘Madame Ghost Snake?’ said the man, reading the name.

  ‘My mama,’ said Vivyen.

  This deep in the ship, the air had a thick, chemical texture, heavy with the scent of unwashed bodies, unclean oils and hot metal. Alivia gagged at the stench but Severian seemed unaffected.

  The temperature had been dropping markedly for the last thirty minutes or so.

  ‘We’re close to ventral hull plating damaged in the void war over Molech,’ said Severian, as though plucking the surface thoughts from her mind. He was a latent, so perhaps he was.

  ‘A good place to hide,’ said Alivia.

  ‘Not good enough,’ said Severian.

  ‘We’re close?’

  ‘Better than close,’ said Severian, putting a finger to his lips. ‘We’re here.’

  He pushed her back against the wall, into an alcove she hadn’t even seen was there, and stood in front of her. Two men approached through the shadows, each with the perforated steel barrel of a stubber held loosely across his chest.

  Crude, grubby, solid-slug weapons, but simple and noisy.

  As much a means of warning as a weapon. Like the man Severian had killed earlier, their lips were stained purple, and Alivia caught the astringent reek of potent narcotics.

  The men drew level. One turned towards the Luna Wolf, looking straight at him, but somehow not seeing him.

  ‘Right here,’ whispered Severian.

  The man’s mouth dropped open in shock.

  Severian’s blade pistoned through it. He twisted the blade up and churned his victim’s brain to gruel. With this man hooked like a fish, he stepped from the shadows and wrapped his fingers around the other man’s neck.

  A crushing squeeze and a crunch of bone. Head and body parted company. The second man dropped in a gushing heap as Severian used the embedded blade to lift his first kill from the corridor, letting it drop out of sight.

  ‘Hide that one,’ said Severian, nodding towards the parts of the second man he’d killed.

  ‘Seriously?’ said Alivia. ‘There’s blood everywhere. I don’t think it much matters whether we hide him or not.’

  Severian looked up from cleaning his blade on the dead man’s robes. Arcing blood spray painted the walls of the corridor and dripped from the curved ceiling.

  ‘Force of habit not to leave easily discovered corpses in my wake,’ he said, standing and sheathing his blade. ‘It won’t matter in a few minutes anyway.’

  ‘How could he not see you?’ asked Alivia, following Severian along the corridor’s numerous twists and turns. Near the end of their journey, his dead man’s map was growing more precise.

  ‘Severian?’ she said. ‘How could he not see you?’

  He shrugged, and she sensed his unwillingness to elaborate.

  ‘It’s a talent I have,’ he said, pausing at the foot of an access stairwell partially blocked with debris and twisted steelwork. ‘Probably the only reason Malcador was able to keep Dorn from having me killed.’

  ‘Dorn? Rogal Dorn?

  ‘Do you know anyone else named Dorn?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There you go then,’ said Severian, climbing the stairwell with preternatural agility. Warm mist spilled from above, moist and laden with a strange perfume that made Alivia want to gag. Like syrup and honey, but over-sweetened to the point of sickly.

  Severian was three times her bulk, yet climbed the web of rebars and broken glass with an ease that utterly eluded Alivia. His oblique answers simply spawned a hundred more questions, but this wasn’t the time to ask them. Instead, she followed the Luna Wolf, trying to step where he stepped, move how he moved. She lifted a hooked length of rebar, testing its weight as a club. Light enough to swing, heavy enough to kill anything she hit.

  The stairwell brought them out onto a wide mezzanine walkway filled with broken packing crates and flapping sheets of cloth. From the scale of structural steel overhead, this was clearly a chamber of some size. Hissing pipework threaded giant girders overhead, interleaving like jungle creepers. Warm rain drizzled from every surface, and Alivia spat a mouthful of brackish, iron-flavoured water.

  Moisture-sheened columns soared like towering tree trunks, bra­cing walls that angled inwards to form the underside of a stepped dome. Alivia was no shipwright and had no idea what purpose such a space might serve.

  ‘It’s a vent chamber for the plasma coolant system,’ said Severian.

  ‘Stop doing that,’ snapped Alivia.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Lifting thoughts from my mind.’

  ‘It’s hard not to,’ he said.

  Alivia took a breath of warm, metallic air, trying to calm herself. Her fear for Vivyen was flaring from her like a beacon. No wonder Severian was hearing her thoughts.

  Panels of corrugated sheet metal lashed to the mezzanine railings kept the chamber below from sight. Sibilant voices drifted on the air, a seductive mantra that concealed a corruption offering one of the easiest route to damnation.

  ‘You were right,’ she whispered. ‘It’s the warp.’

  They crawled towards the railings, and Alivia pressed her face to the plates of warm, wet steel. Through a gap in the corrugated metal, she saw a chamber that more than justified the first word that leapt to mind.

  Temple.
/>   Several hundred people filled the space below, some in white robes, some naked. Fires burned in wide bowls held aloft on chains and the smoke made serpentine patterns in the air. A raised area opposite the mezzanine had been cleared, and a hexagonal platform of metallic crates that looked too much like an altar for Alivia’s liking was set at its centre.

  She swept the crowd, looking for any sign of Vivyen.

  ‘Do you see her?’ asked Severian.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know if that’s good or not.’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’

  ‘Go down there?’

  He nodded.

  ‘There’s hundreds of people down there,’ said Alivia.

  ‘Nothing I can’t handle.’

  ‘What about them?’ said Alivia, pointing to the cybernetics lurking at the edge of the chamber. As tall as Severian, each was armed with serious firepower and plated in bonded steel.

  ‘Thallaxii,’ said Severian. ‘Why did it have to be Thallaxii?’

  Alivia switched her gaze from the chanting supplicants and cybernetic killers as she saw movement at the end of the chamber. Alivia’s breath caught in her throat and she stifled a cry as she saw six figures in white emerge from the darkness, each one bearing a struggling child.

  ‘Vivyen,’ she said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The girl at the back.’

  ‘One of them’s hurt,’ said Severian.

  A boy, no more than fourteen, with a soaking bandage tied around his shoulder. Alivia wished she had more bullets. Every man and woman in this chamber deserved to die for what they were doing here.

  The children were crying as their captors lifted them onto the crates and secured them with chains around the neck. Vivyen wasn’t struggling, and Alivia saw defiance in her posture, a strength she hadn’t even begun to suspect the girl of possessing.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ asked Severian, narrowing his eyes as something suspended on a hideous arrangement of wires and chains jerked through the air.

  ‘Throne!’ hissed the Luna Wolf as the skeletal figure emerged into the light to rapturous awe. Like a famine victim experimented upon by a madman, the naked body twitched like the marionette of a palsied puppet-master. Its suspended body was emaciated and ravaged by toxins, the skull an almost fleshless dome. Unseeing eyes were cataract-blind and its stretched, too-wide grin of a mouth was smeared purple like some nightmarish theatrical clown.

  The children screamed at the sight of it, pulling frantically at the chains binding them to the altar.

  Despite the atrophied ruin of the figure’s form, it was clearly a man, and Alivia’s flesh crawled at the sight of the writhing womb-sac extending from his abdomen. A translucent flesh-pouch that squirmed with some unborn abomination. It detached itself from its skeletal host and landed in the centre of the altar to horrified screams from the children.

  Alivia tightened her grip on her gun and rebar club.

  Severian’s fingers flexed on the hilt of his empowered gladius as he picked up on her fear. He turned to look her straight in the eye.

  ‘Don’t say it,’ she said. ‘Don’t you dare say it.’

  ‘If this is what you think it is,’ he said, making no apology for lifting the thought from her. ‘We can’t let it happen.’

  ‘I know,’ said Alivia with a strangled sob. ‘But…’

  ‘But nothing. If we can’t save her, we kill her. We do it, not them.’

  Alivia met Severian’s gaze and the ice in his eyes was the mirror of her own.

  ‘We’re going down there to rescue those children,’ said Alivia. ‘And if you so much as harm one hair on my daughter’s head, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘She’s not your child,’ said Severian. ‘She never was.’

  ‘Yes she is,’ said Alivia. ‘They all are. Don’t you understand? They’re all my children.’

  Vivyen’s anger had kept the worst of her fear at bay, but the sight of the monster above destroyed the last shreds of her bravery. The skin-bag had dropped, squirmed and heaved at the centre of the stacked crates, a squalling animal in a dripping caul.

  Ivalee shrieked and pulled at her chain, bloodying her neck against the chain’s rough edges. Oskar knelt over Uriah, his hands clasped before him and repeating the same phrase over and over: ‘The Emperor protects! The Emperor protects!’

  Lalique lay curled in a weeping ball. Vesper simply stared at the heaving, screeching thing with a look of resignation.

  It twitched and jumped and spasmed, eager to rip its way into the world. The hanging corpse of flesh looked down at them with dead white eyes and a leering, purple-smeared mouth.

  A pair of needle-like fangs pierced the caul, tearing down.

  ‘Please, mama!’ cried Vivyen. ‘Please help us!’

  Finally the sac split open as the thing inside cut its way out. And in a gush of bloody amniotic fluids its squirming contents disgorged into their midst.

  Severian’s first shots blasted the head from one of the Thallaxii. Two shells, right through the joint of neck and head. A three-round burst through the hip joint of another and put a second on the ground.

  Alivia hadn’t trust enough in her skill with the serpenta to risk wasting a bullet from this range. She vaulted over the railings and dropped into the suddenly panicked crowd of onlookers.

  She landed hard and rolled, hitting legs and bringing bodies down on top of her. She kicked and elbowed her way to her feet, hammering the metalled length of her serpent-etched pistol into unprotected faces and the rebar into the soft bone above the ear.

  Alivia heard the thundering, flat bangs of Severian’s bolt pistol. The impact of mass-reactives on armour. Screeching binaric voices and the whipcrack flashes of lightning guns.

  She had no attention to spare for Severian.

  Robed lunatics came at her, but she didn’t waste her bullets on them. She swung the length of rebar she’d taken from the stairwell, pulping skulls and splintering arms and legs with every swing.

  She left a trail of howling bodies behind her. With her gun extended in front of her and the rebar held high at her shoulder, people fought to get out of her way instead of trying to stop her.

  She saw the altar and the bloody, new-birthed mess upon it.

  ‘Throne, no…’ she said.

  Severian had no qualms about using human shields. These people had forfeited their right to live by being part of this, so whether they died by his hands or the forking blasts of lighting from the Thallaxii was utterly irrelevant.

  He waded through the crowd, slaughtering anyone stupid enough not to get out of his way. Some men attacked him, as if they believed they could actually hurt him. He was doing the universe a favour by killing them before their stupidity got anyone else killed.

  Proximo Tarchon’s glitter-sheened gladius had an edge like a photonic weapon, keener than that honed by any living armourer he’d met.

  Too bad he’d have to give it back.

  Severian’s claim that the hundreds of people were no threat to him wasn’t a boast. Encased in powered battleplate and wrought by the Emperor’s gene-wrights to be an apex killer, it was simply a fact.

  Blood slicked him to the waist.

  He lost count of how many he’d killed. Dozens. Scores probably. Not enough.

  He scooped up three men and hurled them at the nearest Thallax. They broke against its sheet-steel armour, but he’d expected nothing else. A crack of lightning scorched their bodies to ash and flame.

  Severian dropped and skidded low, slamming into the cybernetic. An armoured transhuman was more than enough to put it on its back. The machine-flesh hybrid crashed to the ground, but a Thallax wasn’t a robot, or a sluggish series of commands and doctrina wafers. It had a living mind at its heart, living reflexes bound to its fibre-bundle muscles.

  It
rolled swiftly onto one knee, bringing its weapon to bear. Severian hacked the gladius through the crackling breech and jammed his pistol between the interlocked rings of its gorget.

  Three shots exploded within its armoured carapace in quick succession. The scrap of life within died a moment later. He swung himself around its body as a blitzing storm of jade light exploded where he’d been standing.

  The Thallax toppled onto its side and Severian instantly saw the three remaining cybernetics.

  Closing in. Too far apart to engage together.

  ‘You are smarter than you look,’ said Severian.

  The Thallaxii bludgeoned through the panicked crowd, and those too slow to get out of their way were crushed underfoot.

  ‘But not smart enough.’

  The three grenades he’d planted in his wake exploded.

  Vivyen screamed as the coiled, slippery mess erupted in their midst. Red with blood and sticky mucus, it hissed and thrashed with the pain of its birth. A rugose snake with iridescent scales and an elongated skull that was a vile blend of vulpine and reptilian anatomy.

  Its head split wide in four wedged segments, each filled with long, crooked fangs that glistened with venom. Its eyes were weeping sores, veined with red and yellow.

  Vivyen and the others scrambled away from it as far as their fetters would allow. They screamed and pulled at their chains, scraping their palms raw on the metal. The serpent’s head flashed down and fastened on Uriah’s wounded shoulder. Leathery glands at its neck swelled and the half-dead boy convulsed as venoms pumped into his flesh. Purple stains spread like ink in water across his skin, and frothed matter erupted from his mouth in a torrent of stinking bile. Whipping around, the serpent’s fangs snapped shut on Oskar’s leg and the child howled in agony as its bite poisoned him.

  A series of deafening bangs sounded and people screamed.