Shas'o Read online

  And throughout this dismal farrago there had been no word from the Calavera.

  ‘Silence is good,’ Kreeger would assure him. ‘Silence means you’re on track.’

  ‘Then where are the warp-damned xenos?’ Mordaine had railed. ‘I’ve got nothing the conclave won’t find themselves!’

  With the hive’s detention facilities overflowing and the population growing restive, Mordaine had tightened the screws, first with punitive rationing and curfews, then finally a string of executions, but nobody had come forward with anything he could use. Instead… this…

  How can so many be so blind? Mordaine despaired as he weighed up the crowd gathering in the square below. He was crouched on a rooftop overlooking Hösok Plaza, a sprawling, statue-studded court dedicated to Oblazt’s Imperial liberators. The symbolism of the venue was not lost on him, but it was the sheer numbers that appalled him. There were thousands of them, mostly scruffy manufactory bondsmen and icebreakers, but also a smattering of municipal clerks and free traders. All had daubed their foreheads with the concentric blue circles of Unity. Despite its simplicity, there was something inherently alien about the symbol that repelled him.

  ‘I speak for the Many who walk as One!’ someone called from the square – a tall woman with the gaunt, febrile features of a tormented artist. The crowd fell silent at her voice, as if at a prearranged signal. ‘We offer you the open hand of friendship. Stand with us against the bloated tyranny that has betrayed this world!’

  Mordaine could almost taste the seductive xenos heresy lacing her rhetoric. Yet despite her words the woman in the plaza appeared neither ignorant nor oppressed. Oblazt’s ruling class was a race apart from the commoners and she had the look. Mordaine was unsurprised, for the most zealous prophets of change often rose from the ruling strata. Sometimes it was guilt that drove their heresy, sometimes merely ennui, but the Inquisition had long understood the perils of privilege.

  ‘Cast off the shackles of your dead god and bear witness to a living unity that embraces all as One!’ the demagogue implored.

  ‘The heretics spit in the face of Father Terra,’ someone hissed beside Mordaine. Armande Uzochi. Since Mordaine’s journey into the canopy, the young Iwujii captain had become his second shadow, devoting himself to ‘the great inquisitor’ with an awe that bordered on reverence. Unfortunately there was a rancid, tightly coiled violence about the man that made Mordaine’s skin crawl. He suspected Uzochi was quite probably insane.

  The right man to have by my side today…

  ‘Give the order,’ Mordaine said, feeling disconnected – disconnecting himself – as Uzochi voxed the platoon leaders. Ranks of Iwujii Sharks rose along the rooftops like vengeful spirits, silent and watchful. There was a clatter of booted feet below, and white-uniformed Ironspine Hussars appeared at every egress from the square, lining up in neat formations. The crowd backed away, congealing at the centre of the square as if density might offer some safety, but the rebel speaker held her ground.

  ‘Truth cannot be silenced!’ she proclaimed, spreading her arms wide, palms open. ‘Every martyr you burn will forge two stronger heroes!’ Her eyes glittered a radiant azure, ignited by the passion of her belief.

  Why did you choose me for this filthy work, Escher? Mordaine asked, as he’d done so many times before, but never of the grand master himself. You knew I didn’t have the conviction to stomach it.

  Impossibly, the rebel seemed to be looking directly at him now.

  ‘An inquisitor must armour his soul in ice,’ Escher answered from the crumbling mortuary of Mordaine’s faith. ‘The ordinary mass of mankind is irrelevant, as are even the most exceptional individuals. It is the divine thread of our species that the Inquisition safeguards. All else is either expendable or inimical.’

  No. Mordaine strangled the dry, dead voice in his head. You’re wrong, Escher. Otherwise what’s the point to any of it?

  ‘Captain…’ he began.

  ‘Purge the heretics!’ Uzochi bellowed, misinterpreting him. ‘For Father Terra!’

  No! Mordaine tried to scream, but he had no voice and a heartbeat later there was a surfeit of screams as his army opened fire.

  Kreeger was waiting for him in the stairwell, smoking a lho-stick.

  ‘Tell the Calavera I’m done,’ Mordaine said, stepping past him.

  ‘He’s going to come in,’ Kreeger called after him. ‘He has a few loose ends to tie up first, but–’

  ‘Too late,’ Mordaine said flatly.

  ‘Only a couple more days, duke.’

  ‘It was too late from the start, Kreeger.’ Mordaine turned, letting the rage well up in his chest like purifying fire. ‘We’ve been played – you, me and most especially your precious Calavera! Vyshodd was a trap. This slaughter… We’ve given the xenos exactly what they needed. We’ve proven the Imperium is a monster.’

  ‘Always was.’ Kreeger shrugged. ‘Just like all the rest.’

  Mordaine faltered, his fury leeched away by the other’s indifference. Perplexed, he studied his lieutenant’s deeply seamed yet oddly bland face, trying to make sense of the man who’d been saving his skin for more years than he cared to count. Everything about Franz Kreeger was grey, from his gaunt complexion and the dusting of stubble on his scalp through to the barren alchemy of his soul.

  His story was fairly typical of his breed: twenty years a storm trooper in the Guard, including a stint at the Cadian Gate, then secondment to an Inquisition taskforce to Phaedra, a world somewhere on the fringes of the Damocles Gulf, where he’d impressed the presiding inquisitor enough to win a place on his retinue. Later that inquisitor had become the grand master of the Damocles Conclave and later still he’d assigned Kreeger to support a promising new interrogator.

  ‘Keep him by your side, Mordaine,’ Escher had advised, ‘and he will keep you alive.’

  This was certainly true. Without Kreeger, Mordaine would have stopped running long ago. Angel’s Blood, he wouldn’t have run at all.

  ‘This hive… This entire planet…’ Mordaine whispered. ‘It’s going to welcome the tau with open arms.’

  ‘We’re still in the game, duke,’ Kreeger said. ‘The Calavera has taken a prisoner.’ Then he offered a name.

  Mordaine stared at him. And then he dared to hope.

  FIRE

  Once their hearts are ignited they will burn until hope itself has turned to ash.

  – The Calavera

  UNITY, VYSHODD ANCHOR HIVE

  Liberation day dawned with a chain of synchronised explosions that levelled the nine Ironspine bastions, annihilating thousands of the Koroleva’s Hussars with surgical precision. Simultaneously insurrectionists rose up in the hive’s key facilities, fielding strange weaponry that outranged the archaic lasguns of the authorities. As the uprising spread its numbers grew exponentially, swelled by tens of thousands who knew they had nothing left to lose. After the atrocity in Hösok Plaza, few Oblazti harboured any illusions about Imperial mercy. Whatever hope they had lay in Unity.

  But there was no hope.

  The architects of the insurrection had made one fatal error, failing to consider the fragility of the anchor hive itself. The concurrent blasts that destroyed the Hussar bastions sent a shockwave of seismic proportions rippling through the hive’s foundations, shattering dozens of anchorspikes and placing the remainder under intoler­able strain. With each passing hour more disintegrated, causing the hive to buck and heave like a ship in a storm, tearing entire blocks apart. Whatever the outcome of the rebellion, Vyshodd had been mortally wounded.

  At the roof of the world, the outsiders’ hideout shuddered in sympathy with the hive’s death agonies, but neither occupant appeared concerned.

  ‘You did not foresee this instability, Iho’nen,’ the traveller observed.

  ‘It is irrelevant,’ his giant companion replied, shutting down the outpost’s pow
er. This gesture was also irrelevant, but the centuries had made him fastidious. ‘The deviation falls within tolerable parameters.’

  ‘Unless the canopy collapses beneath us,’ the traveller suggested with a trace of dry humour. ‘Nevertheless, it pleases me.’

  ‘The devastation?’

  ‘Your fallibility,’ the traveller said seriously.

  ‘Then I will endeavour to disappoint you in future.’ Iho’nen threw the hatch open and gauged the shuddering dome. ‘It would be prudent to proceed swiftly.’

  The hive was drowning in a swirling storm of smoke and snow, its harsh panorama of tenements and manufactories faded to coarse abstractions by the smog. Here and there angry reds and oranges bloomed among the dark blocks, marking the virulent spread of the fire. The streets were flooded with a deluge of citizenry, the dispossessed and the destroyers melded together into an amalgam mob by the impartial flames. They wailed and raged as they moved through the burning hive like trapped grubs, fighting and fleeing by turns.

  High above the chaos, crouched on a girder like a bird of ill omen, Ujurakh, who his people called Sourblood, watched their terror and rejoiced. Although his perch swayed dangerously he was untroubled, for his blood was alight with the catastrophe. He had not felt so alive since the Empty One first brought him to this miserable world of ice and iron, many blood seasons ago.

  A stir of movement on a rooftop below caught his attention. Curious, he craned his long neck sinuously, but the source eluded him. Clicking low in his throat with irritation he slipped beneath his perch, clinging on with his talons as he hung upside down, straining to pierce the snow-smog. Then he had them – a dozen prey beasts creeping across the flat roof, striving for swiftness and secrecy, but making a mockery of both. Half were dragging unwieldy cases while the rest flittered protectively around them with guns, and a taller creature hurried them along with a sabre. Ujurakh hissed with surprise, recognising one of the elusive high breeds of the city. Unlike the squat, pallid commoners he had been forced to hunt, this creature was tawny-skinned, with an arrogant bearing that spoke of easy command. Usually the high breeds kept to their fortified palaces, shielded from the squalor, but the fire had finally flushed them out. He guessed this one hoped to make its escape across the rooftops, never imagining that its path would carry it into Ujurakh’s hunting grounds.

  What secret twists turn such proud enshrouded meat? Ujurakh wondered raptly. And what shifting, gifted shapes nest locked within?

  He snapped his beak shut to catch the saliva pooling in his maw and considered: the Empty One had summoned him, but fate had cast this mystery in his path when the hunger was upon him. That he had gorged himself mere hours ago mattered not, for the hunger ebbed and flowed with the inconstant contours of the fleshweave. What to do?

  Then the fugitives were directly below him and the time for doubt was past. Ujurakh drew his twin carving blades and hurled himself into the air with an ululating squawk of bliss. The prey beasts looked up, their flat, dull faces made duller by bewilderment, the surprise dissolving to terror as they glimpsed his lethal symmetry. A couple of the guards raised their rifles, but their movements were sluggish to Ujurakh’s fervent eyes. He twisted in midair, hooting as he danced around the languid flurry of their first las-rounds, knowing the first would be the last.

  As the ground swept up to meet him, Sourblood flipped over, angling himself to strike one of the guards with his extended talons. The attack tore straight through his victim, sundering the man and splattering his comrades with blood. Ujurakh’s powerful legs bent to absorb the impact and launched him back into the air, pitching him over the heads of the panicked gaggle. As they turned with piti­ful slowness he dived among them with a blade in each hand, a slashing, slicing predator among indolent cattle. They flailed about and screamed and died until only the highborn remained.

  ‘Please…’ the creature whimpered, throwing aside its sabre and falling to its knees. ‘It’s yours!’ It waved at the fallen cases that had burst open, scattering glimmering trinkets across the roof. Such baubles might have tempted Ujurakh once, but he was Sourblood now and beyond simple wealth. He had saved the high breed till last to test its mettle and found nothing but a snivelling hatchling. ‘There’s more…’

  Disappointed, Ujurakh beheaded the beast with a scissoring, twin-bladed swipe and plunged his beak into the foaming neck. Though its spirit had been weak, its flesh was delightfully free of the fish and fire oils that tainted the common herd. The Sourblood croaked deep in his throat and fed.

  The wind was a constant companion outside the dome, yet Sergeant Thierry Chizoba could still hear the hive’s death screams. Then again, maybe it was the wind itself that carried the screams so far. It was certainly malicious enough.

  Oblazt. Even the name is bitter, he mused. It is no world for the Iwujii.

  The sergeant flicked his lho-stick away and continued his patrol, keeping close to the walls of the maglev terminus where it was a fraction warmer. Like every building on Oblazt, the station was a monolithic slab of crumbling rockcrete, but behind its derelict façade it had been kept in pristine condition by an army of tech-priests and servitors. Their true charge was the vehicle within, a Chain Engine big enough to whisk away every aristo in the city if things got too hot. Chizoba had once walked the length of the titanic train, counting over two thousand strides as he marvelled at its wrought-iron hide and brass-girdled portholes. There were nineteen carriages in total, suspended well above head height on a splayed skirt that shielded its magnetic suspensors. Wheels weren’t good enough for this monster! It would soar over the ice on a tide of blistering energy while the gargoyles perched along its crenellated heights glared their contempt at the land below. Chizoba could almost taste the patina of spite that enamelled the train. It was an old engine that had borne witness to myriad sins, both sweet and sour. Their unquiet residue ran through its cogs like phantom blood.

  It is a proud and vicious beast, Chizoba had sensed with a shudder. Dangerous.

  How the bluebloods had raged when Inquisitor Escher had seized their secret engine for his headquarters, but they weren’t going to argue with three hundred Sharks!

  Except we’re less than half that now… Chizoba cast a baleful glance at the storage shed where the bodies of his comrades had been stashed like frozen meat. We knew something was coming, yet Grandfather Death took us like un-blooded fools!

  He’d been on the dawn watch when the hive had broken out in a rash of explosions, as if hit by an orbital bombardment. Moments later the station concourse had been awash with the pneumatic rhythm of gunfire and Chizoba had dived for cover as a hulking abomination forged from metal and bloodless flesh stalked from the terminus, spitting bullets from the barrels fused to its arms. More of the living dead machines had emerged from the hangar, bearing down on the nearest Sharks like Grandfather Death’s heralds. Over a hundred men had been lost before the last of the combat servitors went down. Doubtless the attack had been the work of the cog priests who tended the train. There was no telling how many of the machine-worshipping scum had turned traitor – or why – because they’d all vanished by the time the fighting was done.

  Another tremor shook the ice and Chizoba eyed the dome of the hive warily. An hour ago there’d been a thunderous splintering and a fissure had split the canopy wide open, ejecting torrents of black smoke into the roiling sky.

  How long can we wait for the captain? Chizoba mused. We bled to hold on to that damned train. It owes us a ride out of here.

  His eyes wandered guiltily to Lieutenant Omazet. She was kneeling outside the warehouse, chanting the death rites for the fallen, as was her sacred duty. She was an officer, but her authority ran deeper than any mundane rank could convey for she was also La Mal Kalfu, a priestess who had dedicated herself to Father Terra in his darkest aspect as the Midnight Judge. Her kind were rare and revered among the Iwujii and the Third Company was graced by her prese
nce, but the troops feared her more than any commissar.

  She is a blessed curse, Chizoba thought. He was reluctant to disturb her, but with the inquisitor and the captain absent she held authority here. She turned as he approached, breaking off the ritual to freeze him with her terrible, eyeless gaze. He knew the black pits of Adeola Omazet’s eye sockets were just a contrivance of lens-grafts and paint, but when combined with the skull tattooed across her face the effect was uncanny. Besides, his spirit knew the truth of her.

  ‘You have a question, Thierry?’ she asked softly. He shivered at the sound of his name on her lips. It was customary for La Mal Kalfu to address their charges by their first names, lending their words an intimate threat.

  ‘Do you think they still live, lieutenant?’ he croaked.

  ‘I believe they do,’ Omazet said. ‘And we will stand vigil until they return.’

  He bowed his head, knowing she’d seen through to his true question: When can we flee this place?

  ‘Faith is best served blind, Thierry.’ She returned to her sacrament, dismissing him. There would be no flight.

  His eyes raw with smoke, the hem of his scarlet greatcoat smouldering, Mordaine staggered through the burning streets, struggling to keep up with his surviving troops. The trio of Sharks dodged or leapt the debris in their path without breaking stride while he stumbled around it, wheezing hard. He’d lost sight of Kreeger and Uzochi a few blocks back, when they’d got tangled up in a skirmish between some desperate Hussars and what seemed like a whole sea of rebels. After that their orderly retreat had become a frantic race for the terminus.

  ‘Back up!’ the lead Shark yelled. ‘That whole block’s coming down!’

  There was a rending screech as the upper storey of the building ahead sheared away and came tumbling down, ricocheting between the neighbouring tenements like a colossal, infernal die. Mordaine skidded to a halt, flailing wildly for balance.

  ‘Down!’ someone snarled, shoving him to the ground as blazing fragments sizzled overhead, decapitating one of the troopers and almost tearing another in half. The third lost a leg at the thigh and whirled about like a one-legged dancer until another shard ripped a tunnel through his chest.