by Darius Hinks
He paced back and forth, muttering to himself. He should be ecstatic. Draik was dead. The debt was paid. The vendetta was complete. And now he found himself in the ridiculous position of desiring the life that was so obviously out of his reach. He touched the cerebrum cowl, feeling the psychic tremors beneath its surface, crackling and sparking around his third eye, pleading with him to release their power. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘I cannot.’ His gifts were no longer safe. Protecting Draik’s party from the madness had been an easy task, but to reach into the warp, as he would once have done, terrified him. He could feel the sickening change taking place beneath his suit. He was a fractured vessel. Unleashing even a fragment of his power would have disastrous results.
A clattering sound rang out through the hall and Corval whirled around, expecting to see another column reforming. But there were no columns left. The rattling sound grew louder, coming from one of the doorways. He backed away, pistol raised.
Tall, spindly shadows flooded through the portal – dozens of them, rushing into the starlight. Corval cursed. They were similar to the pyramid-shaped drones that had attacked when they landed, wrought of lustreless ore and propelled by twitching spasms. Their heads were wide, like triangular anvils, swaying on a jumble of spindly legs. There were cyclopean lights mounted in the centre of their heads, and as they clattered into the room, their cold, blank gaze fell on Corval.
The drones scuttered quickly across the chamber, their legs scraping and screeching, knives sharpening for a meal. Corval fired. His shot was wild but hit one of the drones’ legs. The blast ripped it clean off, but the machine did not pause, propelled by the momentum of all its other gangling limbs. Almost instantly, the missing leg was replaced by another. It folded down from the creature’s head like an unfurling antenna.
Corval sprinted away from them. The starlight was now refracted by so many facets that the hall shimmered, scintillating and mercurial, dazzling Corval as he veered across the chamber with the spindle drones rattling in his wake. He was making for the nearest of the three portals that led from the chamber, but he could hear from the approaching din that the drones would be on him long before he made it.
‘The eyes!’ cried a voice from the far side of the hall, back in the direction of the drones.
Corval risked a glance over his shoulder and saw Grekh striding into view, his rifle raised to his shoulder.
The drones paused to look back as the creature fired. One of them flipped back through the dazzling lights, liquid spraying from a hole that had previously been its eye. It clanged onto the floor and the other drones fell on it like hungry predators, their razor-limbs slashing in a frenzy of cuts and lunges, snatching the pieces into unseen orifices until nothing remained, only a faint trail of smoke.
Corval felt the same revulsion he always did upon seeing the kroot, but he was not fool enough to ignore his advice. As the spindle drones whirled back towards him, Corval loosed off a barrage of shots, taking careful aim this time, targeting their arc-light eyes. Every shot dropped a drone. Some toppled in a heap, lifeless sacks of scrap; others thrashed wildly as they hit the floor, shrieking and twitching like crippled insects. Some drones paused to slice up their fallen siblings, but others picked up their pace, juddering through the lights towards Corval.
Grekh was still firing, attempting to walk towards him, but the chamber had other ideas. The kroot had only taken a few steps when the air shimmered and changed around him. Corval’s brain struggled to comprehend it. The air split open, fragmenting the kroot along with it, turning the creature into a fan of shards. The more Grekh tried to rush towards Corval, the more he splintered, until he collapsed, shredded into slivers of refracted light.
Corval fired another volley at the drones and ran on, leaping over a chasm and bolting for the nearest doorway. Thanks to the intervention of the kroot, he made it out of the hall, sprinting into a narrow corridor, but he could still hear the drones tapping and clanking after him.
The corridor was a hexagonal tube, more like a ventilation shaft. The ceiling was so low Corval had to stoop as he ran, and the surfaces were made of a different material to the previous chambers – a wire mesh of interlinked strips, like a metal cage. There was light shining from somewhere below, creating a grid of beams that washed over Corval as he ran.
Behind him, he heard the spindle drones crash into the corridor, clattering as they all tried to enter at once. He paused to fire, and saw to his relief that the machines were struggling to follow him down the tunnel. Their razorblade legs slipped through the holes in the wire mesh, causing them to stumble and lurch, toppling forwards rather than running. He added to their problems by shooting out the eyes of the drones at the front, leaving a pile of smouldering metal in the path of the others. Then he ran on with all the speed he could manage, still calling out to Taddeus.
As he ran, an idea started to form in his head. Why not risk the thing he had been hiding from? Without Taddeus to guide him, he was doomed anyway. He would end up just another portrait on Gatto’s shard, staring out into the Helmsman at the drunkards and fools. Either the Blackstone would destroy him, or he would simply waste away, starving to death in its labyrinth of halls and passageways. But he had a tool all those other wretches did not. He touched his cerebrum cowl, sensing the third eye beneath, like a finger pressed against a crack in a dam, holding back the tide. For months now, he had not dared gaze into the warp. The degeneration of his flesh was accelerating all the time and he was not fool enough to think it stopped there. As his skin and muscles decayed, the same would be happening to his mind. He would not even dare guide a ship now. What crueller fate could there be for a Navigator? Robbed of the very discipline that lifted him above his peers, as blinkered and dulled as a normal man. ‘No,’ he muttered, dismissing the idea. ‘I dare not risk it.’
He reached an intersection and ducked down another corridor without pausing. They were all identical, so there was no point pretending he knew the best route. He soon regretted his decision, though. The corridor grew narrower and narrower until he was practically crawling. He was just about to turn back when the passageway broadened out and became an angular precipice, like a balcony, looking out over a tall atrium crowded with angular slopes and ravines. It looked almost like a natural, rocky crevasse, apart from the deliberate way the geometric planes and angles intersected. The atrium was topped with the same clear, crystalline ceiling as the previous chamber, and starlight flashed on the expanses of black rock, or metal, or whatever strange substrate the fortress was constructed from. Where the light hit the planes it looked like art – pieces of black and white card, cut and scattered in a monochrome montage.
As Corval studied the shapes, he recalled the surprise on Draik’s face as he turned to see a gun pointed at his head. Why did I hesitate? wondered Corval. I spent all these years hunting him down, and then when my chance came I struggled to pull the trigger, despite everything he’s done. He still felt as hollow and blank as he had felt when he watched Draik fall. None of this had played out as he imagined.
The clattering sound of the drones echoed down the corridor and Corval hurried on, looking for a way down into the atrium. He dashed back and forth along the whole length of the precipice, but there was nothing – no steps, or ramp. He was trapped.
The sound of the drones grew louder. He could hear their bladed legs scything against each other as they crushed down the narrow corridor towards him. He looked out over the drop, wondering if he could jump. It was hundreds of feet. He’d be smashed to pieces by the cones and prisms below.
A drone lunged out onto the ledge, its legs scrabbling wildly on the smooth rock as it steadied itself. Corval backed away, firing at its head. The second shot hit home, shattering its eye and sending the drone clattering away. Another emerged, then another, like ants swarming from a nest.
Corval kept firing into the throng of lustreless shells but then his back thudded against a wall
. He had nowhere left to go.
The drones charged, their talon-legs flashing as they hurtled towards him. He could not fire fast enough. Dozens toppled before his shots, spinning into the others or dropping from the precipice, but others rushed to take their place.
He clicked an activation rune in his cane and it pulsed with energy.
As the first of them reached him, he smashed the cane into its face, creating an explosion of sparks and splintered metal. The drone fell back into the others and Corval lashed out again, bringing the cane round in a backhanded slash, shattering another eye and engulfing his arm in flames.
Another drone bounded over the two he had downed and slammed into him. It was hard and heavy and the breath exploded from his lungs as he thudded back against the wall. He kicked it from the ledge and halted another one with a las-blast, but then the full weight of the crowd slammed against him.
Pain exploded in his head. His visor filled with blood.
The drones screamed, their legs slicing through him, frenzied, tearing armour, cloth and flesh. No, thought Corval. Not like this. He would not die so close to the Ascuris Vault. If there was even a tiny chance it might save him, he had to know.
With a whispered oath, Corval opened his third eye and stared into the warp. His cowl blazed, white-hot, channelling the force that ripped through his head. The drones halted, frozen in the act of killing, their heads thrown back and their legs sheathed in webs of blood.
Corval rose from the ledge, incandescent, star-like, radiating warp fire as the drones orbited him, rigid and contorted. He was watching himself from far below, on the slope of a black, sheer-sided pyramid. He was both up on the ledge and down on the pyramid. He watched himself, scrambling to hold his place on the side of the pyramid, and realised he was observing that from a third location – a doorway, down on the ground floor of the atrium. He saw himself in the doorway from a fourth vantage point, then a fifth, sixth and seventh, until his mind grew so fragmented it slipped through his grasp.
He turned in on himself like a paper puzzle, shrinking with each fold until, with a final, molecular snap, he ceased to be.
14
Brittle air snapped through Draik’s coat as he tumbled through the darkness. Death could only be moments away, but all he could think of was a name: Numa. A name he thought he’d left behind. How did Corval know it? Did Corval know what he had done?
‘This need never emerge.’ His father sounded distant and distracted as he led Draik from the duelling cages. For the first time Draik could remember, he looked his age – shoulders rounded by the decades, skin as grey as the Terran sky. ‘I spoke to the Novator of House Numa. His grief is… Well, you can imagine. But he knows you were both to blame. There’s to be no trial. He has no desire to entertain the palace gossips.’
‘Then why must I leave?’
The duke’s eyes were dead. He looked through his son rather than at him, waving Draik back into the house.
Draik knew the answer. He was an embarrassment. And he was dangerous. His father was ashamed of him.
Draik shook his head. He was losing himself. He was not on Terra. He was in the Blackstone Fortress, falling to his death. Why was he seeing his father? Without Corval to protect him, the Blackstone was scrambling his thoughts, throwing him into the past.
‘Pain is a bond,’ said his father, looming over him. The duke was young again, only fifty years old, and Draik was a child of six, clutching a bloody shin, battling tears. ‘It locks you to the world, Janus. Trust it. Even if everything else around you is a lie, pain is usually the truth.’
Draik fixed his thoughts on the wound in his shoulder. It was a bright ember of hurt. He had been trying to ignore it but now, remembering his father’s advice, he embraced it, savouring the pulse-pounding agony of torn muscle and burnt skin.
It worked. Terra faded, leaving him alone in the darkness, listening to his coat flutter as he fell. He must have been falling for several minutes without hitting anything. How was that possible?
The Blackstone was playing with him.
He strained his neck, looking for a fixed point, or a light source, or anything he could use to orientate himself. There was nothing, so he made his own light. He grabbed a flare from his belt and hurled it. The explosion was bright enough, for a few seconds, to drive back the darkness.
Draik laughed at the absurdity of what it revealed. He was falling past the fractured hull of a vast, Imperial starship, an ancient ironclad, its adamantium plate scorched and warped by centuries of warp travel, its bones picked clean by legions of salvage crews and void creatures. A forgotten monster of the deep, balanced end-on – skewered and hung by the Blackstone Fortress. What kind of chamber could contain such a goliath? Even on the Blackstone this seemed impossible. The ship’s hull was mostly burned away, trailing shattered bulkheads and rusting, city-sized plasma drives. The design was archaic, even by Imperial Navy standards. Why was it here? How had it come to die inside the Blackstone? Huge as it was, it looked like a morsel of food, rotting slowly in the gut of an even greater leviathan. No, not rotting, Draik realised – being digested. Whole decks were morphing and reforming, becoming the same gunpowder-grey planes as the rest of the fortress – the Blackstone was subsuming it, turning its companionways into impossible angles and its gunnery decks into baffling, abstract patterns.
The flare died away, sinking Draik back into darkness, but now that he knew it was there he could sense the vast hulk he was falling past – a monumental pool of greater darkness, watching him fall. He reached for the grappling hooks at his belt and attached a cable. Then he looped the cable in a loose knot and attached it to his munitions belt, adjusting the settings before hurling another flare and lighting up the wrecked ship a second time. It blazed from the darkness like a divine vision, haloed by broken spires. Draik pulled a device from beneath his coat. It looked like a small handheld crossbow and he used it to fire a grappling hook across the void, towards the distant hulk.
There was a dull clang as the hook latched on to something. Draik adjusted the cable tension, feeding it through loops in his belt, and his fall turned into a swing – a gentle parabola that sent him gliding towards the ironclad, a tiny point of movement soaring beneath its unimaginable bulk.
However elegant his approach, Draik had no doubts about what would happen if he crashed into the fuselage at this speed. The flare had almost burned out as Draik flew towards the shattered remnants of an observation gallery. As the light failed he singled out a broken joist and fired his second grappling hook at a ninety-degree angle to the first, redirecting his swing and draining its momentum as he glided towards a loading hatch. The door was long gone, creating a gaping, toothless mouth that opened onto a lightless pit.
The flare died as Draik’s cable hurled him through the hatch. He crashed into something hard but it collapsed under his weight and he rolled, painfully, across the rubble-strewn floor, his arms wrapped around his head and his knees tucked up to his chest.
Draik came to a halt, surprised to find that he was still alive. There was blood flowing from a cut over his eye and from the gunshot wound in his shoulder but, as he patted down his limbs, he found that the rest of him was intact.
He sat there, in the pitch-dark, taking stock of what had just happened. Corval had meant to kill him. He shook his head, dazed at the betrayal. There was no one in the group he had trusted more. Corval alone had seemed a man of honour. ‘Numa,’ whispered Draik, his voice echoing through the blackness. What did Corval know?
Draik climbed to his feet and gingerly touched the wound in his shoulder. It was clean, at least. He moved his arm. The shoulder joint still seemed to work. The blast had seared through muscle but left the bones intact. It was agonising to move it, but possible. He took some painkillers from his munitions belt and injected them directly into the muscle. Then he wrapped a bandage around the wound, tying it as tightly as he could.
When he had finished tending the wound, Draik triggered the lumen on his pistol and pointed it ahead of him. It flashed over the bulkheads of a burnt-out companionway. There were a few scraps of machinery lying on the deck plating, but no sign of movement. He edged forwards, treading carefully in case the floor gave way. Because the ironclad was upended, he was actually walking along the wall, and every few feet he had to step over ventilation shafts or around doorways. As he walked, he tried to contact Isola through the vox-bead in his collar. As he expected, the only response was a squall of feedback. Whatever the Blackstone was made of, it played havoc with vox networks. How was he going to get back to the others? Without Taddeus, he had no way of reaching the Ascuris Vault. And without Corval, he had no way of keeping sane. As soon as he had that thought, his mind began to slip. It was as though the Blackstone felt his doubt and pounced on it.
‘Without your eyes, you must come alive to the darkness,’ said his father, speaking from somewhere up ahead.
Draik was eleven. Already, he had mastered countless training exercises, but none of them had prepared him for this. The dark lantern. His father had never mentioned it until that very morning, giving him no time to prepare.
He stopped to listen. He could hear the old duke up ahead, breathing lightly, preparing to strike. He could hear the dark lantern’s shutter rattling against its casing. It was a beautiful antique, like everything else in the Draik villa – an ornate tube of wrought iron, clad in delicate filigree and housing a crystal glow-globe. It was designed in such a way that, when the shutter was closed, no trace of light escaped, plunging the training hall into darkness.
Draik remembered everything his father had taught him, keeping his stance relaxed, knees slightly bent, chin raised, rapier held loosely.