Nightbleed

by Peter Fehervari

  Contents

  Cover

  Nightbleed – Peter Fehervari

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Sepulturum’

  A Black Library Imprint

  eBook license

  Nightbleed

  Peter Fehervari

  ‘Needle-bright, needle-dark,

  Will you, won’t you unstitch the light,

  And switch out the stars to blackest night.’

  The Needlesong

  No, the Grey Woman says – or tries to say – when she enters the white ward. No.

  As is so often the way with dreams, her words go unspoken, but not unheard.

  Yes, the ward replies in a shimmer of gleaming tiles, drawing the newcomer forward. Yes.

  The long room opens out around the woman as she advances, its walls falling back to either side like retreating tides, carrying rows of dark windows and vacant beds beyond her reach. Fresh tiles hatch from their neighbours to sheathe the widening expanse of floor and ceiling, breeding in orderly swathes that mock her confusion. Glancing down, she sees she is wearing a trim white tunic striped with blue. There is a tightness about her head, indicating the peaked cap containing her hair. This is the uniform of a life that slipped away years ago, along with her youth and every spark of hope she once nurtured.

  This is where I lost myself, she realises, recognising the ward despite its strangeness. It is an abstraction of the reality she once walked, stripped to the bone then sharpened to a merciless point. Her unease curdles into fear as a lone bed rises smoothly from the floor ahead, like a puzzle piece slotting into place. Unlike the others, it is occupied.

  No, the dreamer protests again, urgently this time. Please, no.

  Yes, the ward insists, its breath caustic with disinfectants. Yes.

  The woman’s legs obey the decree, carrying her onward, caught in the room’s invisible, inevitable currents. She realises her feet are bare and terribly cold – surely too cold for a mere dream? Like poison, the chill spreads up her legs as she nears the bed, numbing her body but leaving her mind raw and receptive to revelation.

  There is a girl in the bed, sleeping, her breath coming in ragged, wet gasps. She is scarcely past childhood, yet her face is gaunt and her scalp hairless. Evidently the sickness in her runs deep – probably too deep to expunge, though nobody will ever know for sure, for she will never be given the chance to heal.

  The bed’s brass footboard is embossed with the Gothic numeral ‘XVI’. A note is taped to it, bearing its occupant’s details, but the dreamer cannot decipher the handwritten scrawl. Those words are not part of her memories. She neglected to read them when this scene was real, so they elude her now. Nevertheless, she knows this patient’s name as intimately as her own.

  Rozalia Temető.

  The Grey Woman is not a killer by nature, so killing has left an enduring scar on her soul. She will never forget the girl she murdered.

  No, she pleads, raising the hypo-syringe in her left hand. It has been there since she entered the ward, primed to play its part in this tragedy. I won’t… I won’t do it!

  Yes, the bed exhales in a waft of budding decay. Yes.

  Surrendering, the Grey Woman is rewarded by a rush of sudden, spiteful eagerness. As she leans over the sleeper she notices the serum in her hypo is black. It isn’t a natural darkness, but the stain of absolute nothingness. Of the void…

  A moment later another aberration becomes apparent. She isn’t holding the hypo in her hand. The hypo is her hand.

  Chel snapped out of the nightmare with a violence that shook her bed’s rickety frame. Her heart was pounding furiously, as though she’d been running hard. Sweat clung to her like a second skin, though the room was cold. Shivering, she peered at her fingers through the gloom, half expecting to find the hypo there. She could still feel it, but her hand was empty.

  ‘A dream,’ she murmured, closing her eyes. ‘Just a dream.’

  And a lie, she added, fearful of speaking the denial aloud, though she didn’t know why. The dream had lied. She had never wanted the girl’s death – and certainly never delighted in it. So why was she afraid to defy the dream’s narrative?

  ‘I’m not,’ she whispered. But that was also a lie. She was no stranger to nightmares, but they’d stopped mattering years ago. Most washed over her like dirty water, leaving a stain without pain, like all the other detritus that passed for her life. These dreams were different, as sharp as any part of her waking experience. Sharper.

  More real.

  When had she ever felt anything so vital as the eagerness with which she’d administered the poison? Or as bitter as the shame that welled up inside her during yesterday’s sleep cycle, when she’d revisited her dismissal from the medicae service? A court of faceless obsidian giants had judged her, their verdict infinitely more damning than the condemnation of their flesh-and-blood counterparts. And when had she known anything like the terror of the nightmare before that, where she’d stepped into a lift and plunged into a shrieking abyss? Or the black despair of the first of these torments? That had been the subtlest, yet most unnerving of them all. There she had wandered her city as its lights expired one by one, leaving hungry shadows in their wake.

  When had she ever felt so horribly, nakedly alive?

  ‘Never,’ Chel answered herself. Could that be a coincidence?

  No, she decided, thinking of the VLG-01. The liquid in the dream hypo had been the same lustreless black as the tarry sample waiting in her lab. And these dreams had begun four days ago, after she–

  Chel shook her head. This wasn’t the time or the place to brood on that choice. Let the worrying wait until she could do something about it. She was no longer a medicae, but the methodology of observation, analysis and treatment endured. It would probably be the last part of her to fade away.

  Opening her eyes, she saw pallid light leaking through the window’s blinds, painting the room in a washed-out twilight that consummated its shabbiness. Far below, the muffled rattle-hiss of the auto-trams had become a near-continuous stream as they ferried workers home.

  It’s still early, Chel realised. The city’s night cycle was only just kicking in. Her shift wasn’t due to start for hours, but sleep wouldn’t return and the thought of lying here in the gathering darkness was intolerable. Besides, if she left now there was no chance of bumping into Lyle. He rarely turned up before nightfall, but sometimes he was too tired to go drinking after work. She’d been seeing too much of him lately.

  Get moving!

  With a groan, Chel threw aside her rumpled blanket and rolled into a sitting position, then perched on the bed’s edge, waiting for her spinning head to catch up. She’d been working nights almost four months now, but her body still hadn’t acclimatised. The apartment’s constant chill didn’t help with getting up either, but Lyle was against heating it.

  ‘We live under a dome, Chel,’ he’d explained in that slow, condescending tone she’d once taken for gravitas. ‘Our city regulates itself like a living body – light, heat and clean air filtered, cycled and recycled to keep things running smoothly, as our fore-founders intended. It’s not our place to interfere with The Balance.’

  ‘The Balance’ was always capitalised in Lyle’s speech, as much an article of faith as a matter of machinery and science. Chel suspected everyone in the Canopic Congregation felt the same way, from the army of labourers who kept the city’s vast dome patched up, to the tech magi who communed with its ailing spirit. Not that anyone would admit its spirit was ailing – at least not openly. The integrity of the dome was deemed beyond reproach. Voicing doubts bordered on heresy. After all, everyone’s lif
e depended on The Balance.

  ‘As above, so below,’ Lyle was fond of saying. It was the credo of the Congregation. He always proclaimed it as if he were imparting some profound wisdom, though he’d never explained its meaning. Chel suspected he didn’t know either. He was just a minor functionary in the organisation, but he talked as though he were a full administrator, puffed up with pride and big ideas. She’d found that endearing once.

  I thought he was a dreamer. Chel snorted at the notion. They had both been in their twenties when they met. Back then she had been a junior medicae, doing her internship in one of the civic hospitals. Lyle had been admitted with a bowel disorder, which Chel diagnosed as stress-related. The context couldn’t have been less romantic, but they’d found humour in it, which sparked things off. She’d liked his earnest manner and devotion to their city, mistaking servility for idealism. They had married within a year.

  But that was all before…

  Thrusting the memories aside, Chel rose and padded over to the room’s sanitation cubicle. It was so cold she was tempted to skip showering, but she was sticky with the nightmare’s residue. She needed to wash it away.

  I wish I could.

  She showered in the dark, unwilling to face the apparition that stared back from the cubicle’s mirror. Though she wasn’t yet forty her skin was ashen and her close-shorn hair peppered with white, as if age had reached a withered hand back from the future to clasp her prematurely. At this rate she’d be an old woman by fifty. Oddly the prospect didn’t much trouble her, just so long as she didn’t have to see it.

  ‘I won’t,’ Chel promised herself, unsure what the vow meant.

  The water was a lukewarm drizzle with a faint chemical odour, but she relished it, delaying the moment when she’d have to step out into the cold again. Nothing better awaited her in the long night ahead.

  Gonna be a good night, Skreech decided. Gonna be sharp!

  He stepped back from the alley wall to gauge his handiwork. The painted words glowed neon pink in the gloom. It wasn’t a colour he’d have picked, but these days he used whatever he could scavenge. Besides, it didn’t blunt the credo’s edge. Emblazoned in the spikey script he’d perfected over the years, it had power. Bite.

  ITZ A LY

  Skreech chewed his lower lip, agonising over adding an exclamation mark. He raised his spray can then lowered it again. No, too much. It didn’t need to shout. Not this time. He’d painted the slogan plenty of times over the years, usually with a mark, but this was his best. Maybe pink worked after all.

  ‘It’s a lie,’ he read in a growl, reaching for the tidal hatred that had washed him onto this path. As always, he only found a trickle of that wave, but it was more lively than usual. He was getting closer. And the Night Below was getting stronger.

  Growing! Skreech thought. Spreading right under the Sleepers’ noses.

  He grinned at the notion, showing sharpened teeth. Filing them into points had been crazy painful, but the spidery tattoos covering his face had hurt far worse. He’d inked them himself, using a pilfered kit, without a clue how to do it right. The infection that followed had ruined his skin and forced him to hole up for weeks with a fever, but he’d hugged the pain close, knowing it would make him stronger.

  ‘It’s a lie,’ he repeated, his mantra addressed to the Sleepers. They were the dross who strolled, shambled or staggered through life without smelling its deceit – the blue bloods and worker drones who kept things rolling along, and all the dreggerz and dedhedz who fell between the cracks without fighting back – and worst of all, the priests and enforcers who kept all the rest in line. Kept ’em blind! Some of the lawmen probably smelled their world’s sickness – they waded through too much sin and shit not to – but they didn’t have the guts to taste it, let alone drink deep and run wild with it, as Skreech did.

  ‘All a lie…’ He placed a hand on the wall. Sometimes he could feel the current of his secret saviour coursing through the city’s bones, breathing fleeting life into metal, stone or glass. That pulse was what woke him up in the first place. He’d been a kid back then, just coming on fourteen, but he’d never questioned the message – never hesitated to serve when it opened his eyes to The Lie.

  I served them up, he recalled fondly. Served them sharp!

  Taking a fork from the kitchen, he’d crept into his parents’ room one night and stood over the sleeping forms, waiting for a sign. They were rich folks, undertower Alpha-bloods who’d hidden themselves far from the dome and the endless night beyond, never imagining the deeper darkness already inside. No matter. Their son brought it home to them.

  ‘Woke you up!’ The messenger giggled at the memory. ‘Made you see the night.’

  A tremor had run through the boy, more intimate than anything his god had offered before. Electrified, he’d plunged the fork into his father’s left eye, hard enough to pop it, but not enough to pass right through, then spiked the other one before the first strike even registered. The screams had roused his mother as the boy came for her eyes. She’d opened them as he stabbed, which was helpful, but she’d also tried to sit up, which wasn’t, because the prongs had ended up going too far and killing her outright, denying the revelation he’d granted his father. But things had worked out all right ’cos she’d given her son a gift instead. The boy heard his true name in her dying screech. Yes, a screech. It hadn’t sounded like a human shriek at all. It was more like the noise beaked animals made in the vid-casts he’d seen. Birds, they were called. At first that struck him as funny; then he’d realised it was another sign and found his name.

  Later, long after he fled the undertowers and took refuge in the slums, he’d pared the name down to its raw form, scraping away the stupid rules his tutor had drummed into him. That was how Kristopher Eugene Bunditz became De Skreech Dat Shreddz De Lyt.

  Of course the city knew him by yet another name…

  The wall twitched beneath his palm. It only lasted a moment – a divine heartbeat! – but there was no mistaking its meaning. The slogan had pleased his saviour. Skreech moaned happily. It had been a long time since his devotion was acknowledged. Even his bloodier communions had been met with silence, but he’d never once questioned his faith – never wondered if it might all be in his head. This was proof he was back on his game. It called for something special.

  The night’s herald pulled up the collars of his leather trench coat and crept from the alleyway. Bright lights lined the avenue beyond, hanging from arced pylons like offerings, burning to hold back the encroaching hab-blocks. The city’s thralls hurried along the pavements, ignorant of their bondage, but the crowd was already thinning as the evening’s stampede died down. Auto-trams trundled along the tracks at the street’s centre like boxy yellow beasts, human cargo visible through their dirty-glass eyes. It didn’t matter which way the herd rushed. They’d all end up in the same place soon enough.

  ‘It ain’t real,’ Skreech murmured, allowing himself a flicker of pity for the slaves. ‘None of it.’

  He glanced up. High above, the dome might have been a star-studded sky, its sunlights dimmed to bright points for the evening cycle. Skreech hated the cycle. It was another scam to keep the herd docile. Sarastus’ real sun was deep in its dotage, its radiance faded to grey long before humanity claimed the planet. The land between the five great cities was dead, its waters tainted by acid and its air bitter, but it was honest. Skreech had climbed out onto the dome’s skin once to taste it. It was a dangerous pilgrimage, not least because it was strictly forbidden, but it had been worth the risk. It proved his faith.

  ‘It’s a lie!’ he yelled as a tram sped past. Nobody heard him over the racket, but it felt good to proclaim it out loud. ‘All a lie!’

  Someday soon the Night Below would answer the call of the Night Above. Like a titanic obsidian needle, it would rise up to pierce the dome and crack The Lie wide open. The signs were everywhere. The city was
ready to break. It just needed a push.

  ‘Gonna put out your lights, dedhedz!’

  Shoving his hands into his pockets, the street prophet joined the throng. As he walked, his eyes flitted over each passing face, hunting for inspiration.

  Yes, this was going to be a good night.

  The lift was a long time coming. Someone had smashed its indicator panel so Chel waited in ignorance, trusting it was on its way. There were twelve lifts serving her hab-tower, three to each side, but only seven still ran. Her apartment was on the one hundred and thirty-first floor, roughly midway up the block. Walking down a stairwell would take over an hour. Walking back up might as well take a lifetime because she’d never last the journey. Lyle claimed he’d done it once, but that was years ago, before he let himself go. Over the last decade he’d run to fat while she’d wasted to skin and bones, as though one body had leeched the other, though neither benefitted from the transaction.

  If the lifts die, we’ll die with them, Chel reflected bleakly, gazing along the corridor to her right. She never walked that way, though it offered a shorter route to her apartment. Something about the passage repelled her. As always, many of its overhead bulbs were out, while the rest blinked erratically, transforming it into a patchwork path of light and shadow. Winged bugs worshipped at the surviving lights, fluttering about the bulbs in faltering circles, confused by the flickering. There was a mournful quality to their devotions, as though they suspected their idols were mocking them. Some of the flyers had defected to the steadier illumination of Chel’s torch. Like many citizens, she carried her own light source, fearful of getting caught in a blackout. They were becoming more frequent, occasionally plunging entire districts into darkness for hours. Lyle, who refused to carry a light, claimed it was nothing to worry about, but–

  There was a scraping noise along the shunned corridor.

  Chel shone her light into the gloom, her other hand drawing a shok-jak from her pocket. The compact weapon only had a single charge, but she’d been assured it packed a heavy punch. She’d bought it from one of the stimm dealers on her district’s outskirts. Like the seller’s primary wares, it was illegal. Lyle would be scandalised if he found out, which pleased her.