She jumped back, feeling the pain of her wounds flare into sharp, white fire. The edge of the woman’s sword struck the bracer on her left arm, bit deep and sheared away. She stepped back, but the movement was too slow, and the cloaked woman was coming forwards, cutting again and again. She reversed her sword, parrying and deflecting as she backed against the wall. Severita could feel the thread of prayer in her mind fray. Blood was pulsing now from the wound the shrapnel had ripped in her torso armour. Behind her she could feel the frozen, crackling presence of Enna and Mylasa.
‘Emperor, aid Thy servant…’ The words ripped from her mouth. The swords struck again, but this time she arched her back, bending like a willow in the wind. The cloaked woman’s sword slid past above her as she uncoiled. The other woman flinched back. Severita kicked out, and felt the impact jolt up her leg. The woman slammed back through the ruin of the door. Severita followed, sword ready to deliver a final blow.
Something dived out of the dark. Severita had an instant to catch a glimpse of wings and chromed talons, before it struck her. Shrieks filled her ears. Wings beat around her head. She raised her sword and hand, but talons had already found the flesh of her neck. She had a second of feeling numb cold cascade through her, and then she was falling down to darkness, the high shrieks filling her ears as the faltering prayer in her soul vanished into the darkening world.
Ninkurra picked herself up off the floor of the corridor. The psyber-hawk was still perched on top of the bloody form of the guard. A Sister of Battle, almost certainly, and an exceptionally resilient and skilled one at that. Ninkurra was lucky to be alive.
She stepped back towards the door. A flicker of thought pulled the hawk to her shoulder. A groan came from behind her and she turned. Iaso was sprawled on the floor where she had fallen after the krak charge had blown the door in.
‘Be still,’ she said. Iaso flinched but did not disobey. Ninkurra looked through the door. She spent a breath letting her eyes glide over the details. A single candle set on the floor was the only natural light source. A figure, wreathed in ice and ghost-light, hung in the air in the middle of the space. Ninkurra could feel the power of the mind inside the figure’s skull, but it was directed, locked and focused on the heat-cloaked casket bolted upright to the floor. There was someone inside, a smudge of pale face framed through a view slit.
Ninkurra aimed her pistol through the door at the floating psyker. She was not going to take the risk of going any closer with it still alive. She breathed out slowly, her finger squeezing on the trigger.
A bullet slammed into the gun as it fired, and ripped it from her hand. Yanked off target, the round hit the psyker on its shoulder and tore through the bulbous machines ringing its neck. It spun back, tumbling to the ground. The force of the psychic cry made Ninkurra sway. She turned, eyes and mind trying to find the shooter. The hawk launched from her shoulder, wings spreading, beak opening. A bullet tore its head off before it could beat its wings. It tumbled to the deck, thrashing. Ninkurra dived through the door. The fingers of the hand that had held the pistol were burning with pain, but she could still kill in other ways. She rolled and came up next to the casket, blade raised.
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said a voice from by the door.
Ninkurra rammed the tip of the shard-blade down towards the still face beyond the view slit. A bullet hit the descending blade. It shattered. The magnetically-cohered shards rang off the metal of the casket. The second bullet hit her sword hand just after the first hit the blade. The impact pitched her onto the floor. She rolled, stabbing her will out at the shooter’s mind. And struck cold ice.
Three more bullets hit her in the shoulders and knee. She collapsed, the world swimming around her.
A man in a quilted bodyglove advanced from the shadows. His eyes were still, his movements unhurried. His hands hung loosely, a pistol held in each. Ninkurra gasped, tasted blood on her tongue and spat at him. The man raised an eyebrow then squatted down, so that he was only an arm’s reach away. Ninkurra tried to move her arms, tried to find a last thread of strength to match her defiance.
‘I hit the nerve clusters,’ said the gunman. ‘The upside for you is that you should not be feeling much in the way of pain. The downside is you don’t get to murder me with those oh-so-very deadly hands of yours.’
Ninkurra closed her eyes and stabbed her mind at him again. He blinked.
‘Your master should not have sent you alone,’ he said, and his voice had shed the casual softness that it had held before. His blue eyes were suddenly cold and hard. The words folded into Ninkurra’s smudged thoughts. ‘And he should not have interfered. His is the hand on the scythe, not the sower of seed.’
Her master… how did he…?
‘He is a man of faith,’ said the gunman. ‘He should have known that angels watch over the worthy.’
‘Who…’ began Ninkurra. But the man had holstered one of his pistols and held up a single bright silver coin in front of her.
‘The path to resurrection and revelation is not simple.’ He nodded at the casket. ‘She matters more than you, more than me.’ He opened his mouth and placed the silver coin under his tongue. ‘And so she must live, and you must pass through the gates of night.’
He stood. The muzzle of his pistol was a black circle in Ninkurra’s eye.
She opened her mouth to spit again.
‘And not be reborn in light,’ he said, and pulled the trigger.
Cleander stumbled and fell as he came around the corner. Viola caught him, flicked a glance at one of the household troopers, and he felt another strong arm loop under his shoulders and steady him.
‘You are a fool, or have you just decided that you finally want to die?’ hissed Viola.
‘Is that concern?’ he gasped, as they kept moving. Troopers were moving ahead of them. The ship-wide alarm had finally started to sound. ‘I always thought we both agreed you were overdue to inherit.’
‘If you were not already one step over the threshold I would push you over the door of death myself,’ snapped Viola. ‘Especially if you keep talking.’
He began to laugh, and fire burned across his back.
‘Mistress Viola!’ one of the troopers up ahead shouted.
Cleander could see the wreckage of the hatch door leading to the room where they had kept Enna Gyrid. More troopers ran forwards, guns raised, but Cleander was looking at the figures slumped on the corridor floor.
‘Are they?’
A household trooper with a medicae flash on his shoulder was kneeling next to Iaso, another by the bloody tangle of Severita.
‘The medicae and the Sister are both alive,’ said the trooper.
Viola pulled herself out from under Cleander’s arm, and he slumped into the trooper supporting him. Bal stepped through the wreck of the door, his pistols holstered. Behind him a bloody corpse lay on the floor next to Enna’s cryo-casket. Blood had stained the melting ice and slush on the floor pink.
‘You got here in time,’ said Viola.
The lifeward gave a grim smile.
‘Only just,’ he said, and nodded to the bloody corpse on the floor. ‘Whoever the assassin was, she nearly made it.’ Cleander saw him glance at the thawing cryo-casket and the face of Enna Gyrid beyond the crystal view slit. ‘Whoever sent her wanted this sleeping-dreamer dead very badly.’ He paused. ‘Who is she? You said she was called Enna Gyrid, but who is she?’
‘Mistress Viola! Captain von Castellan!’ An armsman with a boosted vox-set came through the door. Viola turned, but the man was already speaking. ‘Signal through from the bridge. The storms and etheric interference have broken…’
‘What?’ asked Cleander. ‘How?’
The man paused, took a breath, and something in the way he straightened sent ice down Cleander’s spine.
‘Something has happened on the surface.’
Silence filled the long moment that followed. It was Viola who spoke first.
‘Tell us,’ she said.
&n
bsp; EIGHTEEN
Koleg felt his mind turn over as the Neverborn howled towards him. His skin shivered over his muscles. Inside his skull a smothering, silent scream echoed on and on. The cut threads of his memories and emotions writhed. Ghosts of hate and fear rose and shouted at him to run, to charge, to put the gun to his head and pull the trigger and let it all be done.
He levelled his pistol and fired. Rounds roared from the macrostubber. Muzzle flare reached three metres out and brushed the faces of the charging daemons. He panned the gun across the mass of limbs and maws, cutting through dust-like flesh. The barrel glowed red a second before the ammo cylinder ran dry. He snapped it free. A daemon shaped like a ball of tentacles and teeth bounded forwards. Koleg snapped a fresh cylinder in place as the thing reached for him. He was not going to be fast enough – he knew that with a cold certainty even as he looked up into the mouth yawning wide above him, its throat a well of shadow.
A wall of white fire slammed into the daemon and blasted it back into a cloud of dust and screaming shadow. Covenant came forward into the gap. A cold light haloed his head, and his sword was lit as he drove it into the mass of Neverborn. Lightning and steel met flesh. The light around his head blazed bright, and a wave of force ripped outwards from him. Koleg felt himself launch back. The power ploughed into the Neverborn, pulping bodies back to powder. Covenant let out a cry of effort and the psychic force changed shape, narrowing into an arc that sliced on like a sickle through grass. The air was thick with the smell of frost and iron.
Covenant strode in the wake of the psychic wave. Dissolving hands and talons reached for him from the floor. The bald man’s face was serene, his eyes clear, though there was blood running down his chin from his lips.
‘You are one of the three,’ said Covenant. ‘The Wanderer.’ His shoulder cannon twitched, but spun to fire at the daemons still crawling from the air. He held his sword before him in both hands. The cold lightning of the power blade pushed hard shadows into the recesses of his face.
‘You let this holy place burn just for this moment, did you not?’ said the Wanderer. The cannon on Covenant’s shoulder twitched around and fired. Light exploded around the man. When the flash faded the man was still standing there, just as he had been before. Covenant advanced. The roar of torn reality and gunfire seemed to form a tunnel before his steps. ‘In the reckoning, what will weigh in the balance against your atrocities, Covenant?’
‘You are a false servant of the Throne,’ said Covenant.
The Wanderer gave a single shake of his head, and the gesture raised the memory of a priest that had talked to Koleg as a child, and explained that salvation did not mean kindness.
‘I am shriven,’ said the Wanderer. ‘I am damned, but I take that burden for mankind. Even for you, Covenant. Sins should only be carried by those that can bear them.’ Covenant was five paces away, sword rising, eyes fixed. ‘Salvation for mankind, that is all that matters. Everything else is just a dream that has lost its way.’
An invisible hand slammed the man back off his feet. The Wanderer’s conversion field flared bright and brighter, strobing through colours as it overloaded, and Covenant was charging now, sword rising. The daemons of dust howled and turned towards Covenant. Koleg fired, sawing gunfire through the grey talons and maws reaching for his master. The Wanderer’s halo of light vanished, and the edge of Covenant’s sword descended like a comet dragged from the night sky.
A shape blurred across Koleg’s sight. He had enough time to catch the impression of glowing wounds crossing bare muscle and a curved edge that dragged the light from the air in a smear behind it. Covenant’s sword slammed into something, and the gloom exploded into shreds of shadow and howling light.
Bishop Xilita locked the iron door behind her, and pulled the key out of the lock. The air of the governance chamber vibrated with the sound of pistons, and the clank of turning wheels. The venting plumes of flammable gas from the governor machines pulsed orange light through the chamber. Huge whirling stacks of black metal projected through a web of gantries that led from the door.
She paused for a second, looking at her shadow as it fell on the door she had just passed through. It was small, and led to a spiral stair that led up to her sanctuary. It was the only way of reaching this chamber and the iron door the only way in or out. She turned the key to the door over in her hands.
A servitor clanked towards her. Dust and wear covered its machine components.
It stopped, and a speaker set in its chest buzzed as it prepared to speak.
‘I bear the seal and blood of my office,’ said Xilita, holding out an open hand. ‘Obey my command.’
The servitor looked at her. Light pulsed in the cracked glass of its eye, then it reached out and scratched a needle-tipped finger across her outstretched palm. Something clattered in its cranium, and then it bowed.
‘What is your will?’
She looked at it for a long moment, feeling the words hovering just behind her lips. She thought of all the things she had done, and all the secrets she had kept, each of them weighing over the years more heavily than the chains that bent her back and dragged on her limbs. Through the grating beneath her feet, she could see the long drop down a pipe-lined shaft to a distant, molten glow.
‘Was I right?’ she asked.
The servitor tilted its head.
‘I do not comprehend your command.’
She smiled and shook her head.
‘What is the point of all of this… suffering, if it is not for something, you know, for something greater? It has to be, doesn’t it?’ The servitor buzzed and clanked with confusion. Xilita shook her head, then held up the key that would unlock the door out of the chamber, and dropped it over the edge of the gantry, down into the molten glow below. ‘My command is to shut down the governance machinery. All of it.’
‘Compliance,’ said the servitor.
Glavius-4-Rho twisted as a hound-like thing made of darkness and dust lunged at him. He skittered back, and one of the mechadendrites on his back arched over his head. The beam of its neutron-laser struck the creature, and bored through it. Its strength might be powered by energies beyond rational analysis, but the dust of its body fused and melted in an eyeblink. He swept the beam through the next monstrosity, feeling his power reserves drain. His machine limbs shivered. Warnings buzzed through his awareness. Paradoxes were swarming through his data systems. Parts of his system and consciousness were filling up with shrieks of corrupted data as reality bent and broke in the presence of the daemons. He tried to step back as a cloud of things with wings and bladed mouths formed from the dust and air. The gears of his legs locked. Error data flooded him.
‘All is pure in the machine,’ he muttered, and dumped purge routines through his machine components. For a second he blanked out, and came back to awareness only just in time to lash an electro-wreathed hand through one of the flock of winged daemons that had dived at him. Sparks arched up his arm. Inside his remaining flesh he felt pain.
The cathedral boiled with the sounds of conflict. Beyond the breach in the main doors they had entered through, his long-range sensors could detect body heat and vibration. There were people coming. Humans. Or things that might be humans.
Across the tenuous connection he still maintained with the monastery’s limited machine spirits, he felt something shift and then begin to blare a warning.
‘Judge Orsino,’ he spoke across the short-range vox. Behind him, the human called Claudia had shrunk back beside a pillar. Epicles had his back against the cold stone, his mouth moving, blood-stained sweat running down his face. The warning rose in pitch across the link to the monastery’s systems. ‘Judge Orsino!’ repeated Glavius-4-Rho, shouting the words with all the power he could spare.
Beside the next pillar in the avenue, Orsino flicked a glance at Glavius-4-Rho as she fired a bolt into a billowing mass of feathers and forming faces. A ring of arbitrators remained around her, still firing. Covenant and Koleg had vanished behind a
blur of dust through which flashes of light threw shadows.
‘What?’ she shouted.
‘I believe that there are a high volume of hostiles within a short distance of our location, and closing.’
‘Noted,’ she replied. The judge paused to reload her pistol. Her braced limbs moved with clockwork slowness.
‘And…’ he began. A figure came through the breach in the great door. It stood for a second, its red rags bloody and soot-stained. It raised its head, and howled through the mask nailed to its face. Then it ran forwards. More came through the breach. Dust daemons spiralled through the air towards them and ripped into them, coiling into their flesh, feeding on the blood as it fell.
‘And,’ Glavius-4-Rho forced himself to speak. ‘I am receiving a warning across the machine-link I have with the monastery’s systems. The geothermal regulators beneath the complex are being shut down. Once that process is complete a catastrophic volcanic event is inevitable and imminent.’
‘Can you stop the process?’ she called. Two of the arbitrators had now switched fire back towards the figures swarming through the breach in the cathedral doors.
‘No,’ said Glavius-4-Rho. ‘The progression of events is now inevitable.’
Covenant reeled back, barely catching his balance as the shock of contact shuddered through his sword.
I will die here, he thought.
The sickle blade that had caught his blow blurred towards him, moaning, dragging molten light with it. Its curve was half a metre wide, its edge a notched razor. In his psychic senses it shrieked hunger and pain, babbling as the sigils stamped into its metal burned.
Here is where I fail for the last time.
The figure wielding the blade was tall, stripped to the waist and hugely muscled. Scars and brands criss-crossed his skin, blending divinity and blasphemy. Blood and fire wept from the marks on his hands and arms. He blurred as he moved, jerking like a drawn image on the margins of the flicked pages of a book. Covenant could feel cold fury and agony and control radiating from the man, rippling through the warp as reality distorted around the blade.
Incarnation - John French Page 27