Shas'o Page 6

  ‘Up!’ Mordaine’s saviour rose beside him, looking like a wiry scarecrow in black flak armour. Kreeger.

  ‘I told you this was a bad idea, duke,’ the veteran said.

  Yes, you did, Mordaine admitted. His lieutenant had argued sternly against re-entering the hive, urging him to sit tight and wait for their ally, warning that the Calavera had insisted on it. That had been the tipping point for Mordaine and he’d insisted on leading an expedition into Vyshodd to assess the uprising. It had been irrational but, after the string of humiliations he’d endured in the Calavera’s name, the need to defy his shadowy benefactor had been irresistible – and disastrous. They’d turned back as soon as they’d run into the first mob, but it had already cost them dearly.

  It was necessary, Mordaine thought furiously. I am nobody’s fool.

  ‘We should get moving, duke,’ Kreeger said, watching him quizzically.

  ‘I thought you’d fallen, Kreeger,’ Mordaine said, but it was a lie. He couldn’t imagine this grey man dying. He gestured at the rubble-choked avenue they’d been following. ‘Is there another way to the terminus?’

  ‘This is a hive.’ Kreeger shrugged. ‘There’s always another way.’

  Sourblood… The Empty One’s call stirred inside Ujurakh’s skull, a brittle but insistent whisper like the echo of something unforgettable forgotten. Lost in the rapture of his feeding he tried to ignore it, but the whisper became a whine, threatening the bright, obliterating pain that bound him to his master. Once he had mocked pain, as all great warriors did, but that was before he’d learnt what pain truly was. That did not lessen the rage and shame he felt at his bondage, though he doubted any of his blood kindred would have endured the torment any better. Blood kindred? He had none. They had named him Sourblood and cast him out!

  Ujurakh realised his feast had grown quiet. The summons had numbed his palate to the delicate riddle of the flesh. Furious, he surged to his feet, letting the silent meat slip from his beak. Once again the Empty One had stolen his joy. With a squawk of disgust, he sheathed his blades in their leather harness and sprang into motion, sprinting for the parapet. He leapt at the last moment, soaring over the gulf to crash down onto the adjacent rooftop. Without pause he hurtled on, skittering over the frozen skin of the burning city, chasing the beacon that chained him.

  ‘Sergeant,’ a trooper called. ‘You need to take a look at this.’

  Keeping low, Thierry Chizoba crept over to the squad crouched by the gates of the terminus. They’d reinforced the position with the company’s precious heavy bolter to cover the icebound expanse between their sanctuary and the great dome.

  Chizoba squinted, trying to make out the figures approaching through the fluttering weave of snow. There were two of them, both clad in grey robes, their faces hidden in arched cowls. They were walking at a measured pace, seemingly untroubled by the soldiers watching them. One seemed impossibly tall, yet it was the other one that troubled him most deeply. There was something wrong with its gait, a subtle hop, almost as if its joints were deformed. Or built differently to those of a man…

  ‘There will be someone else coming,’ the inquisitor had warned before he left. ‘You’ll know them when you see them.’

  ‘Go get the lieutenant,’ Chizoba ordered, unsure why he was whispering.

  Keeping low, Kreeger peered round the junction ahead. They’d almost reached the outer wall of the dome when a babble of voices had slowed them to a crawl and they’d found a throng of Oblazti gathered in the next street. Perhaps a desperate Koroleva captive had led the mob here or perhaps it had been blind chance.

  ‘How many?’ Mordaine whispered, already certain the answer was too many.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ the veteran said. ‘We’re out of time. We have to go through them.’

  ‘Kreeger…’ Mordaine began uneasily.

  ‘Surprise and shock,’ his lieutenant interrupted. ‘We hit them hard and push through to the terminus. Don’t stop for anything.’ He unclipped a strangely fluted grenade from his bandolier. ‘When the numbers are against you…’

  His words were drowned by a clamour of gunfire and shouts from the street behind them. Mordaine spun and saw a ragged band of Sharks charging towards them with Armande Uzochi at their head and what looked like half the hive on their tail. The Iwujii captain was laughing wildly as he snapped off shots at his pursuers.

  ‘I guess we’re done with surprise,’ Kreeger muttered, twisting the casing of his grenade. ‘Shock’ll have to carry it.’

  He hurled the explosive into the adjacent street and ducked back. There was a bright flare and a whoosh of heat and then he was moving again. ‘Go!’ Bolt pistol in one hand, shock maul in the other, he leapt round the corner before the concussion had faded. Mordaine drew his pistol and followed.

  ‘Tears of Sanguinius…’ He stopped in his tracks, appalled by the carnage in the next street. The grenade’s blast had sounded insignificant beside the cataclysm tearing the hive apart, but it had exacted a terrible toll in the close-packed avenue. Through a haze of dust he saw bodies everywhere, charred and smoking. Those who could still stand were staggering about blindly, clutching at faces that had been scorched to the bone.

  ‘Quit dreaming, duke!’ Kreeger yelled from somewhere up ahead.

  As the dust settled Mordaine saw the blast had only broken half the mob. Further along the street at least thirty still stood and Kreeger was already among them, swinging his maul like a madman. The survivors were sluggish with shock and armed with makeshift weapons, but their numbers would be telling once they rallied. All sported the concentric circles of Unity on their foreheads, marking them as wilful traitors rather than hapless folk caught up in the chaos. Suddenly that austere icon seemed to symbolise so much – lies within lies, encircling and constricting Mordaine’s own fate into an unbroken and unbreakable spiral fall…

  If I die here the Imperium will remember me as a traitor, he realised, if it remembers me at all. He wasn’t sure which possibility troubled him more.

  Filled with bleak rage, he set his antique laspistol to rapid fire and charged the mob. He was no marksman, but skill mattered little against such numbers, especially when a man was wielding an Argent Repeater. Kreeger had often mocked the baroque weapon as a vanity piece, but it was vindicating Mordaine’s faith now.

  Only the thread matters, Escher’s words spun through Mordaine’s head, over and over, like a mantra of exoneration for the lives he was ending. Only the thread…

  Smoke billowed abruptly from his pistol’s casing. As Mordaine fumbled with the setting a hulking rebel swung at him with a masonry-tipped pole. He flung himself backwards and the block whipped past his face with an inch to spare, then came arcing back like a pendulum. This time it whirled over his head as he slipped and crashed onto his back, mercifully holding on to the Repeater. As his attacker loomed over him he levelled the pistol with both hands and fired. The weapon whined and died. The rebel grinned as a bolt-round tore through his skull from behind.

  ‘I told you to keep moving, duke!’ Kreeger yelled, offering his hand. ‘We–’

  A spike erupted from his throat, spattering Mordaine with blood. Kreeger’s eyes rolled down to peer at the tine jutting from his neck, then swivelled back to Mordaine like painted glass orbs. There was no fear in them, not even shock or pain, just a profound ambivalence. Stunned, Mordaine saw Kreeger try for a shrug. Then the spike was yanked free and the grey man toppled into oblivion.

  Were you always dead inside? Mordaine wondered numbly. Or did something make you that way?

  Mordaine rolled aside as Kreeger’s killer, a one-eyed fishery worker, jabbed at him with the blood-slick harpoon. Desperately the interrogator feinted a roll, grabbed the spike and thrust back on it. Taken by surprise, his foe skidded over, losing his grip on the weapon. Screaming holy obscenities like a possessed man, Mordaine swung the harpoon about by its spike, st
riving to keep the traitors at bay.

  With an ululating war cry Armande Uzochi leapt past him, whirling his heavy-bladed machete like a crazed dancer. A handful of Sharks followed, one stopping to haul Mordaine up as he passed. The interrogator glanced round and saw the pursuing horde was almost upon them. There was a mania driving that sea of wild, broken faces that had nothing to do with the ideals of Unity.

  The tau will never understand us, Escher had once observed. They cannot because they lack our infinite capacity for insanity.

  ‘Inquisitor!’ Uzochi snapped. ‘We must go!’ The captain was radiant with violence, his sharpened teeth stained with blood.

  At least Kreeger never enjoyed the killing, Mordaine thought vaguely.

  Ujurakh vaulted over the wall of the station compound and flattened himself in the snow, listening for sentries. He could hear the prey beasts jabbering in the distance, but none were close. Predictably they had all flocked to the main gate, drawn only to the obvious threat.

  Such blunt unthinking eyes with which they see with and seem to be like, the Sourblood mocked. Their thoughts are as flat and feeble as their faces!

  After leaving the hive he’d set out across the ice and circled back, approaching his destination from behind, as the Empty One had instructed. For once he’d been grateful for his master’s call, for without it he would have been swallowed by the white nothingness. Keeping low, he crept towards the building ahead, seeking the great engine his master had described.

  Thierry Chizoba steeled himself as he returned to the gates where the robed giant waited, looming over the Sharks like a harbinger from the old tales. The stranger’s face was shrouded inside his cowl, but he was obviously watching the road to the hive, indifferent to the shadow he cast. Only Lieutenant Omazet seemed unaffected, but then she was a shadow creature herself.

  ‘I have secured the prisoner,’ Chizoba reported, ‘and Ironfingers has awakened the engine’s machine-spirit.’

  ‘They are coming,’ the grey giant said. His voice resonated with a sibilant metallic harmony, doubtless due to a helmet of some kind, yet it was surprisingly soft. Not at all the kind of voice Chizoba would have expected from a Space Marine, for surely the stranger could not be anything else.

  ‘I see nothing,’ Omazet said.

  ‘My eye sees truer than either of yours,’ the giant answered.

  Mordaine hurtled round another corner and suddenly he was past the canopy and racing straight into the biting teeth of the blizzard. He could see the dark smudge of the terminus ahead, just a few hundred metres away. Uzochi was still at his side, but the other Sharks were gone, devoured by the gestalt beast at their back.

  It will follow us out onto the ice, Mordaine sensed, and on into perdition.

  He heard Uzochi yell the watchword as the station’s defenders came into sight. They were just vague sketches in the white maelstrom, and poor ones at that, for one of them seemed unfeasibly tall. As Mordaine tried to make sense of that deviant figure the rest opened fire. Las-bolts and solid rounds hissed past him, leaving steaming contrails in the flurry. He glanced round and saw the front ranks of the mob fall, but the rest surged on regardless – numberless – uncoiling from the hive like a serpent.

  Even if we reach the train, the Dragon of Vyshodd will overtake us…

  And then a small sun detonated behind him, washing the swarm with flames and beheading the serpent. The shockwave hurled Mordaine forwards and smashed him into the ice with a bone-crushing force then sent him tumbling towards darkness.

  His back was on fire! Frantically he rolled over, screaming as his shattered ribs protested. Gasping breaths of jagged glass, he spat blood onto the ice. Blearily he saw Uzochi stagger past. The captain was howling with pain as he fought to cast off his blazing coat. Then Mordaine heard other, angrier howls as a pack of survivors lurched out of the smoke. Their flesh was blackened, but the murder in their eyes was undimmed.

  You were right, Escher, Mordaine thought. When we fall, we fall hard.

  An explosive mechanical roaring erupted over the wind and the damned were torn asunder. Dazed, Mordaine turned his head and saw a robed giant striding towards him. It was wielding the Sharks’ heavy bolter as a mortal man would wield a rifle. The warrior spun about at the waist, scything down the traitors with blunt efficiency. Uzochi crashed down beside the reaper and caught sight of its hooded face.

  ‘Grandfather Death comes for us!’ he cried. Mordaine couldn’t tell if it was terror or rapture that moved the captain, but in that scream he heard the last thread of the captain’s frayed sanity snap.

  Then the stranger was standing over Mordaine and he understood that Uzochi was right, for it was death incarnate. The wind had whipped away its cowl, revealing a stylised bronze skull whose eye sockets were melded into a single dark aperture. A crystal orb burned in the recess, embedded just above the bridge of its nasal cavity, lending the harbinger a cyclopean aspect.

  ‘Calavera,’ Mordaine whispered, knowing it must be so.

  ASH

  After the inferno has devoured itself, fall to your knees and scour the ashes, for that is where you will find Truth.

  – The Calavera

  SEVEN HOURS AFTER UNITY, UNDER THE SHADOW

  The broken man opens his eyes as he is carried into the hanger. He is almost overcome by terror when he sees the train squatting on the maglev track, for it looks like a titanic serpent – and wasn’t a serpent hunting him just moments ago? But then he remembers that the vengeful serpent was made of flesh while this one shines bright silver. He even remembers that such serpents are called Chain Engines because they link the anchor hives of Oblazt. And then he also remembers that he cannot breathe and the terror returns twofold as he begins to choke on his own blood.

  ‘Will he live?’ a woman with the face of a skull asks as he slips away…

  He joins Grand Master Escher in the brig of the Enshrouded Eye, the flagship of the Damocles Conclave. His mentor has brought him to see a tau prisoner captured at the tail end of the crusade. It is a tall, almost skeletally thin being that Escher calls an ethereal, one of the tau ruling caste. The creature regards him through the glass walls of its holding cell, assessing him as if he were the prisoner and it the captor. Its stillness runs blood deep, giving it the appearance of a surreal statue, a distended parody of a man forged to embody absolute serenity. Or superiority.

  ‘Tell me, interrogator, what do you see?’ Escher asks from the shadows. The question paralyses the broken man for he is both repelled and fascinated by the xenos prisoner. He understands that this is a test because everything Escher asks of him is a test, but even after years of service he has no idea what the ageless ancient wants of him. Perhaps it is Escher’s blindness that makes him so impossible to read.

  ‘Yes, what do you see, gue’la?’ the ethereal echoes, its voice penetrating the glass with shocking clarity. Is it mocking him?

  ‘I…’ Pinned between the scrutiny of two inscrutable beings, the broken man hesitates. ‘I see the unclean,’ he says. ‘I see a xenos monstrosity.’ Though his answer is not false he knows it is inadequate and so it chokes him and there is…

  Pain beyond endurance! He opens his eyes and sees that Death has sliced him open and is rummaging about inside his chest, searching for truth.

  ‘You are killing him,’ protests the skull-faced woman, but he cannot tell if there is concern in her rebuke.

  ‘A rib has punctured his lungs, lieutenant,’ whispers Death, whose face, naturally, is also a skull. ‘He will drown in his own blood if I do not work it free.’

  Another shadow lingers behind them both, little more than the transient impression of a dark man whose pale face is a geometric confluence of incandescent scars. He regards the patient with something that might be pity or contempt or perhaps nothing at all. One of his eyes burns with fever, the other, a corroded augmetic, with unholy fire.


  ‘It’s a lie,’ the stranger tells him wordlessly.

  Then something snaps inside the broken man’s chest and he screams and the wraith is gone, banished to a deeper darkness where a daemon bell tolls.

  Death looks up and appraises the broken man with a single eye of liquid glass. ‘Pain is an illusion, Haniel Mordaine,’ he says.

  My name? Death knows my true name, Mordaine despairs as he falls into a memory of bright azure eyes and…

  The hauntingly beautiful woman he has just introduced to Inquisitor Aion Escher blossoms with blades and strikes him down, unravelling his mentor into a meaningless spiral of blood and bone. She has murdered the grand master before Mordaine has even finished introducing her as his new data specialist. Then she turns to him with a smile like silver slaughter, but Kreeger puts her down with a bolt round before she can take a step.

  ‘She was an assassin,’ Mordaine says flatly. ‘I brought an assassin aboard the Enshrouded Eye.’

  ‘We have to go, duke,’ Kreeger replies as he searches Escher’s body.

  ‘Go…?’

  ‘Fast and far from here.’ The mercenary nods in satisfaction as he finds the inquisitor’s seal. ‘These are gene-coded, but it won’t hurt to have it.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Like you said, you brought an assassin on board the grand master’s ship,’ Kreeger explains as if he is talking to a child. ‘In the Inquisition’s eyes that’s going to make you a traitor or a fool.’ Somewhere an alarm begins to wail. ‘So, do you want to live?’

  I can’t die, Mordaine gasps at Death, even though he knows mercy is a mystery to such a being.

  ‘No,’ whispers the one-eyed harbinger. ‘That would be wasteful.’

  FROST