Nightbleed

by Peter Fehervari

  ‘You sure?’ His expression teetered between gratitude and guilt.

  ‘I am. Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll be right outside then,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Holler if you need me.’

  Chel watched him go then faced the vessel again. There was a brooding expectancy about it, as though it had been waiting for her. How long had it been here? And who’d brought the sample to her lab? It hadn’t appeared with the regular batches. For that matter, the name on the testing requisition form – Vedas – had been unfamiliar, though its authorisation stamp was in order. How was that–

  No, such mysteries were inconsequential. The drug had come to her because it wanted to. Wanted her. She felt sure of that.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, taking the final steps towards the barrel. ‘Why me?’ That was the only question that really mattered. ‘Tell me.’

  Up close, she saw the bands girdling the container were engraved with runes, though she couldn’t make them out clearly in the gloom. Hesitantly, then with sudden eagerness, she reached out and ran her fingers over them, trying to identify their forms by touch, though she couldn’t say why. Like so much else recently, the action felt inevitable, as if she were snared by some implacable gravity that rendered volition obsolete. Perhaps that had always been the way of things, but she’d never noticed before. Maybe choice was only ever illusory. She couldn’t decide whether the possibility was repellent or comforting.

  There was a scuffling sound somewhere behind her, punctuated by a harsh gargling. Chel tried to turn, but the runes wouldn’t allow it. They crawled beneath her fingertips like worms etched in water, urging her to follow their flow. Follow… Closing her eyes, she circled the barrel, drawn along by the riddle. Follow…

  ‘What are you?’ she murmured.

  ‘What are you, Chel Jarrow?’ the enigma asks in answer.

  Opening her eyes the Grey Woman sees she is in the infinite ward once again, standing over the sick girl. No… not sick. Rozalia Temető is already dead, her face livid with decay, yet her eyes are open, their faded irises fixed on her.

  ‘Why?’ the corpse demands in a drowned voice. ‘Why me?’

  The Grey Woman stares at her victim, aghast.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘An accident…’ she confesses. ‘It was an accident.’ She had been so tired that night, drained by a triple shift she should never have accepted, but pride had demanded. She’d misread the bed numbers, mistaking XVI for XIV, and administered a blood thinner to the wrong patient – a girl whose metabolism had reacted violently to the error. ‘It was a terrible mistake.’

  ‘Then it was for nothing,’ the dead girl croaks.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t want your pity.’

  ‘No,’ the Grey Woman whispers. ‘But–’

  ‘Make it mean something.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Believe in it. Embrace it. Choose it.’

  ‘Choose it?’

  ‘Make me a sacrifice.’

  ‘I…’ The Grey Woman hesitates, sensing a final, unforgivable precipice. ‘I can’t change the past,’ she protests.

  ‘But you can choose your present.’ The revenant leans towards her, its body creaking with rigor mortis. ‘Choose!’

  ‘Yes,’ Chel breathed, accepting her fate. In that moment her hand found the barrel’s spigot. It protruded from an octagonal panel, almost level with her face. The plate was embossed with the cryptic acronym, along with a phrase in bold Gothic script:

  VLG

  ~ AS WITHIN, SO WITHOUT ~

  While her eyes lingered on the words, Chel’s fingers turned the spigot’s tap. Then her mouth found the spout.

  As above, so below, she prayed as the dark nectar gushed past her lips.

  The Needleman took the watchman as he left the warehouse, slitting his throat with a strike intended to silence and slay in the same instant. The wound was mortal, yet the old man still fought back, scrabbling for his killer’s throat as his life leached away. The fury on his face was exhilarating to behold – so much sweeter than the dog’s mindless rage – but like the beast before him, he was defeated by his foe’s iron visage.

  ‘So it flows,’ the victor whispered, lowering the watchman’s body gently, wary of alerting its true prey. ‘Until all the world’s bled dry.’

  Sighing in anticipation, the Needleman crept into the warehouse. The overhead lights were sparse and feeble, leaving much of the chamber in darkness, but that was no impediment to its purpose. No, it was the leg wound that dismayed it. Spasms wracked the hunter’s muscles and its vision fluttered as it moved, threatening to disintegrate altogether.

  ‘I am legion,’ the Needleman hissed, steadying itself with the promise of its brethren.

  The woman was waiting beside a massive container, her back to the hunter. She turned as it approached, meeting its gaze without surprise or fear. Indeed her long, pale face was entirely devoid of expression. Dark liquid trickled from her lips, staining her chin and the front of her jacket. Woven logos of the tin-can deity grinned from her lapels, revelling in its worshipper’s excess.

  ‘Will you, won’t you rise to fulfil the Fall?’ the Needleman asked, stalking towards her. This was the customary question it offered the chosen ones, though whatever they wailed or whimpered in response, whether threats, bribes or pleas for mercy, the answer was always the same.

  ‘Oh yes, you will!’ the herald confirmed, whirling its claws in a slashing salute. Then its step faltered as it noticed something else about its prey.

  Her eyes were black.

  The Dark Woman regarded the creature before her with detached contempt. It was an inane, unfinished wretch, drenched in blood and banality. She recognised the supernal entity its makeshift claws and mask aspired to, but the mimicry fell far short of the graffiti that had enthralled her earlier that night, let alone the reality. The youth who’d stalked her skulked behind the sham, clinging to his delusions like a drowning man.

  ‘You are nothing,’ she judged. Picturing his mask’s cord, she tore it free with a twist of her will. ‘Let me make something of you.’

  The boy stared at her, terror and envy warring for supremacy on his face. Stripped of his façade he was pitiful – a frail and quailing thug who’d imagined himself so much more. Only the violence in him survived his exposure, too ingrained to scour away.

  ‘Come then,’ the Dark Woman goaded, knowing he couldn’t resist the challenge. ‘Kill me if you can.’

  With a snarl the youth lurched towards her, his claws slashing in dual swipes. To his foe’s heightened senses the attack appeared sluggish, as though he were wading through water, while her domain was air. She darted inside the languid arcs and rammed her shok-jak’s blunt prong between his jaws, shattering his teeth and tearing through the tongue behind. The charge activated when the tip hit the back of his throat, spewing electric current through his skull. His eyes widened as they broiled, then burst wetly. Sparks played about the charred sockets, teasing out black smoke. More leaked from his jaws, which had melted around the prong jutting from them.

  ‘You were a lie,’ his executioner declared, releasing her weapon. She stepped away as the dead man’s claws completed their passage, gnashing together like teeth. The impact unbalanced the corpse and it toppled over, flat on its back.

  ‘For the Fall,’ the Dark Woman proclaimed, granting the fool a purpose in death. Her eyes met the vacant gaze of the mask beside him.

  Will you, won’t you? it asked.

  Deciding she would, the night’s new herald picked it up. It was a crude thing, yet they shared the same creed. They had both sacrificed to hasten the coming darkness. In time she would far outstrip the grubby offerings of its creator, but the mask itself was potent.

  This isn’t me, a plaintive voice beseeched her, but it was buried too deep to matter any mor
e, if it ever had. Ignoring the ghost, she glanced at the liquid-filled monolith. The urge to worship at its fount and drink again was strong, but she understood she’d had her fill. Whatever remained was for others to savour. She would approve it as an additive, of course. That would be her final act in this squalid temple-factory, for she wouldn’t be returning. Soon the nectar would find its way to Carceri’s forsaken, too diluted to awaken their flesh as it had awakened hers, but sufficient to open their eyes. Their enlightenment would be one of many unravelling threads in this world’s greater dissolution.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered to the monolith. ‘For the choice.’

  Leaving the warehouse, she stopped beside the dead watchman. When the bodies were found questions would be asked, but quickly quashed in the name of productivity. The authorities would never hear of the murders. And in due course the cadavers would return here in another form.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the Dark Woman said to the old man. It was her second apology of the night and the last she would ever offer.

  Skreech lay in a darkness more complete than anything he’d ever desired, dead yet horribly present, severed from sensation, yet all too aware of the voracious, watchful giant looming over him. Pleading without words, he begged for forgiveness – for another chance to serve – but if his dark god heard him it paid no heed.

  The Dark Woman took the stairwell back to her old apartment, striding up the mountain of steps as confidently as her former self would have crossed a room. Occasionally she passed shabby, broken-faced figures, but they slunk away from her, sensing she wouldn’t be easy pickings, which was the only kind they cared for. Reaching her floor, she stopped to peruse the hallowed graffiti that had signposted her path. The mandala was still there, testifying to the sanctity of this place, but the figure was gone, its message served and its territory relinquished to a new custodian.

  ‘We are legion,’ the Dark Woman acknowledged. Later she would ascend further and claim the tower’s derelict heights as her eyrie, along with the abandoned souls who congregated there, taking some as worshippers, others as sacrifices, for they were ripe for either role. But first she must accept the sacrament that would seal her allegiance to the night.

  The supplicant donned her predecessor’s mask then walked the corridor she had always shunned, shivering as its shadows caressed her. Soft but insistent, they teased her flesh and bones into finer, sharper forms with every step she took, eliciting pleasure and pain in equal measure.

  Will we, won’t we… the mask murmured, sharing its wearer’s epiphany.

  The Dark Woman gasped as her fingers lengthened then split, budding crooked blades that chittered when she flexed them. Her elbows splintered in sudden sympathy, then multiplied and knitted into new configurations that would defy mortal eyes. A few steps later her knees followed, twisting into manifold opposing arcs, yet she kept her balance, instinctively adapting to the changes. When her torso shattered she screamed from the soul, then moaned as the fragments realigned and spun thorny tendons to bind themselves anew, though the knots were restless, for rigidity offended them.

  We are legion!

  As she neared the end of the passageway the mask tightened about her face, fusing with the skin and skull beneath. Creaking, it distended further, gouging fresh eyes along its length as its chin passed her riven waist.

  We are legion!

  The pilgrim’s path ended at its old apartment. It slipped through the cracks in the door and flitted to the bed it had once shared with a fool. The man was there now, his jowls quivering as he snored, lost in the last refuge he would ever know. Even in sleep he reeked of arrogance. His atonement would be lengthy and extravagant, his confessor decided. Its claws clicked in anticipation, drooling shadows over the oblivious penitent.

  ‘As above, so below,’ the Needleman intoned in a voice that swarmed with barbs. ‘As within, so without.’

  Then it set to work and True Night drew a little closer.

  About the Author

  Peter Fehervari is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Requiem Infernal, Cult of the Spiral Dawn and Fire Caste, as well as the novella Fire and Ice from the Shas’o anthology. He has also written many short stories for Black Library, including the T’au-themed ‘Out Caste’ and ‘A Sanctuary of Wyrms’, the latter of which appeared in the anthology Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters. He also wrote ‘Nightfall’, which was in the Heroes of the Space Marines anthology, and ‘The Crown of Thorns’. He lives and works in London.

  An extract from Sepulturum.

  Morgravia awoke with the taste of sump filth in her mouth. She knew it was an illusion, a weird sense memory and her mind’s oh-so-humorous way of remembering her past trauma.

  ‘Lumis…’

  Candles flared, their sodium generators buzzing noisily as they activated. The light revealed a small hab-unit. It was bare ­ferrum, a chair in one corner where Morgravia had draped her clothes and other meagre belongings, a deep metal wash sink in the other. A rough mattress served as her bed. Scowling at the fever sweat dampening her thin sheets and blankets, and shivering at the chill prickling her flesh like a haunting spirit, Morgravia hauled her weary body into a sitting position. Pain struck her with a legion of daggers. It was all she could do to stop herself from crying out.

  A single hexagonal skylight let in the flame-lit predawn of the low-hive. She stepped through its grainy shaft and over to the chair, where she rummaged around in her longcoat. Finding a handful of stimms, she bit down, wincing at the chalky non-taste, and went to stand before the room’s full-length mirror. She looked upon her naked form, enacting a daily ritual.

  She was lean-limbed, muscled but not grotesquely so. Pale, milky skin reflected the light. She was tall, around six foot. One ice-blue eye looked back at her, alive with more vitality than she felt; the other one, yellowed and bloodshot, was a truer reflection of her physical and mental state. Silver-grey hair, shaved at the temples, a short mohawk forming a raised channel running between them, framed a stern but not unkind face. Yet it was strange to her, a rogue identity staring back from the dirty glass. Only the scars made sense, and these she found mostly unchanged. They threaded her body like zippers, a cross-hatching of permanently discoloured flesh that forced a mildly disgusted frown onto her face. One pull and she would unravel. All the warm wet red inside would come tumbling out, her flesh left a flaccid and empty vessel in its wake.

  Undone, she thought, tracing the frenzied lines of scarification with her fingers.

  It had been thirty-one days since the tunnel.

  ‘Emperor’s mercy…’ she whispered, and looked away, reaching for her tunic.

  Morgravia froze, her hand poised in midair, her body half-turned.

  A sinister figure stood before her, limned by the skylight, and for a moment she wondered if it were an actual spectre and not just the fever sweat washing her skin that had caused the chill in her bones. It smelled of blood and oil, and detached itself from the shadows with silky, yet syncopated movements. A blade flashed, its edge silvering in the light. A face with a rictus grin, two hollow sockets gaping around faintly glowing red eyes, regarded her.

  Morgravia set down the pistol she had snatched from her gun belt, letting out a shuddering breath.

  The rictus face crumpled into a frown.

  ‘You should put on some clothes, Mother. You will catch your death.’

  Morgravia scowled and grabbed her tunic. ‘What do you want, Hel?’

  Cristo had worked in the labour-pits of Meagre all his life. He was a bullet-maCristo had worked in the labour-pits of Meagre all his life. He was a bullet-maker, and a good one. His shells and munitions had a ninety-three per cent approval rate. Not many factorum labourers hit ninety-three per cent. He took pride in his work, though it was back-breaking and largely thankless. His proficiency at his job did yield some benefits. Slightly better food, his pick of the munition lines. Not much,
but it left his belly fuller and his skin cooler, positioned as he was as far away as possible from the smelting furnaces under the labour floor.

  It also attracted jealousy from some of his fellow workers. Toil in the pits was hard, relentless; it bred strong bodies but resentful minds. That resentment was usually reserved for the overseers, who tempered the slightest suggestion of unrest with the lash or the pain-maul, all the while sermonising on the purity of hard labour, the cleansing baptism of honest sweat given in the Emperor’s name. When offered the opportunity to direct his impotent fury somewhere other than the untouchable enforcers of the Emperor’s will and war machine, a man would take it. He would exercise that crushing sense of futility where it could be vented, where his suffering could be displaced onto another.

  Cristo had heard the muttered threats, and caught the bitter glances directed his way; he had never believed they would be acted upon. Not at first. The labour-pit was a congested battery farm of human bodies, lurching in metronomic tandem. So numerous were the workers that maintaining vigilance over the entire labour cadre at all times was impossible, and yet no one man would raise hands against another for fear of reprisal. Not in the labour-pits, at least.

  There were antechambers that bled off from the main pit, however, and these were less frequented. Several refectoria allowed for the taking of meals and an ablutions block served doubly as a decontamination chamber.

  They had come for him here, jagged metal shivs glinting in the grimy washroom light. Three men, none of whom Cristo knew by name, though he recognised their faces well enough. The encounter had been short, brutal. He had killed them all, naked and caked in the rough, powdery scrub that served as a cleansing agent. Cristo was not a small man. He had bulk and muscle that his attackers’ strength in numbers failed to balance. It had happened quickly and almost silently. Cristo had been left with half a dozen lacerations, bleeding red into the grainy grey run-off gurgling down the drainage vent. Of his three attackers, one suffered a broken neck, another took a shiv through his jaw and up into his skull, and the third had his eyes gouged out so deeply it was possible to glimpse the inside of the back of his head through the grossly distended sockets.