‘Quite the racket,’ Myre replies, flatly.
The Sighted fire back from their gun-nests in the buildings on either side of the avenue, and from the Sanctum itself. Dozens of squads in blue-grey flak are arrayed in front of the spire behind crude fortifications, protecting the shielded face of the spire with missiles and solid rounds and hails of las.
‘Hope you’re hanging on!’ the gunner yells as he answers the enemy fire with his own.
Then the Valkyrie pulls into a steep climb up the face of the Sanctum. Tyl’s world tilts, but she has a snap harness attached to her plate and she clings to her handhold as the engines howl and the airframe groans under the stress and then they are up and away and out of range of the Sighted’s guns. There are holes in the Valkyrie’s hull big enough to see through in places where they took high calibre rounds. The world tilts back and the gunner turns. His face is weather-tanned around his goggles and breather. Tyl can tell he is grinning even with most of his face covered like that.
‘Just a detour, sir,’ he shouts.
‘Coming up on your drop,’ Jova, the pilot says. ‘Thirty seconds.’
Tyl nods at Jeth and Myre, and they move their way to the back ramp of the Valkyrie. She feels the way the aircraft cuts speed as a tug on her bones, followed by the vertical thruster jets kicking in as they move into position above their drop.
‘Quickly now,’ Jova says. ‘We have hawks on radar.’
‘Ready,’ she says, to her Duskhounds.
Because in that moment, without Fel, that’s what they are.
Hers. Her responsibility.
‘Aye,’ the two of them say together.
Tyl hammers the release switch for the Valkyrie’s rear ramp. The ramp lowers and opens to the roar of the wind and the gunship’s jump-jets. The blast shields are pitted layers of adamantium-mix that cover the whole side of the spire, save for those three heat exchange vents, each tall enough for a soul to stand up in and protected by heavy, industrial grating. A lip of black iron no more than two metres wide runs beneath them. That’s it. Their designated drop. Beyond that ledge, the spire drops dizzyingly towards the ground. Almost half a kilometre of freefall.
And not one of the heartrates in Tyl’s helmet display flickers at the sight of it.
Tyl fires the grapnel line down onto the ledge where it sticks and then hooks the cable to the rappel anchor in the airframe of the gunship. The cable autowinds in and goes taut, even in the high wind.
‘Let’s go and make some fates,’ Tyl says.
And she takes hold of the cable and swings out into a quick descent. Tyl feels the pull of the wind. The temperature measure in her helmet’s display drops sharply. The slide is fast and over in seconds. Tyl’s boots hit iron and she moves straight to the heat exchange vents, with Jeth and Myre right behind her.
‘Duskhounds free and clear,’ she tells Jova, over the vox.
Myre gets to setting the heat-charges. They activate with white-hot flashes of light and start eating their way through the industrial-grade plasteel of the vent covers.
‘Acknowledged,’ Jova replies. ‘Maintaining cover.’
The Valkyrie turns, holding position over the spire, and then Tyl hears the scream of hawks on the chase.
‘You might want to hurry yourselves,’ Jova says. ‘It’s about to get noisy out here.’
Tyl looks out to see the enemy fighters drop through the cloud cover. Lightnings. Two of them. Jova’s Valkyrie moves out at speed to engage.
‘Myre!’ Tyl says, putting her hellgun to her shoulder.
Her rifle is modified with a longshot scope and an extended barrel, but even that won’t allow her to hit the Lightnings, not at that speed.
‘Ten seconds!’ Myre replies.
It’s nothing, ten seconds. Ten heartbeats. But in those ten seconds, Cassia Tyl sees Jova’s Valkyrie fire its lascannon. A spear of light. The Lightnings both answer with their hellstrike missiles in the same instant. White smoke and fire flashes. Countermeasure flares burst around the Valkyrie, making a halo for it. Her helmet display dims. Tyl takes a breath. Fires her hellgun anyway.
Despite herself, for the sparest instant, she thinks about that half a kilometre of freefall.
The bolt from the lascannon takes one of the Lightnings, turning it into a fireball. It stops screaming and falls out of the sky. The second fighter peels up and away into the clouds with a roar of afterburners, and in the last of Tyl’s ten seconds, both hellstrike missiles hit Jova’s Valkyrie. The gunship keens and tilts sideways, smoking. Spinning. Losing altitude and fuel in a stream of liquid fire. The vox-link with Jova clicks live in her ears, but not a word is said. Tyl only hears altitude alarms and feedback.
‘We’re in,’ Myre says.
Cassia Tyl blinks, then turns away from the edge and the city and the Valkyrie falling to earth.
‘Let’s go,’ she says, and walks into the darkness of the vent system.
‘Now,’ Frayn says. ‘We break them.’
Kolat’s eyes are still dazzled from the mines going up as Vurn guns Stoneking’s engine and she rolls forwards again, into the devastation left by the mines. Her joints and her tracks creak and sigh. Beside them, their sister machines do the same. Behind them, the troops follow.
‘Thirty seconds to outside range,’ Kolat shouts.
This time the Sighted aren’t trying to bait them, they are trying to break them. Stoneking shakes and cries around Kolat as the targeter hones towards zero, but he doesn’t want to hear that. He wants to hear her sing.
The instant they hit outside range, he calls it out and waits for the words.
‘Main cannon fire!’ Frayn yells.
Kolat thumbs the firing stud and Stoneking sings. Her sisters join her a moment later. The detonations from the Demolisher shells shake his bones, even at outside range.
‘Load!’ Kolat shouts, as smoke blooms and rolls, obscuring his view of the barricades.
‘Aye!’ Curi shouts, not slow now. Quick when it counts.
Vurn keeps pushing Stoneking forwards as Curi reloads the main cannon. Close range is all the better for breaking. The closer they get, the more Kolat can see the damage they’ve done. The Sighted’s barricades are a ruin and their guns are quieted, but the blast shielding on the spire is still up.
It doesn’t seem a good trade. Not for Mountainsong.
‘Up!’ Curi shouts. ‘Cannon ready!’
‘Fire!’ Frayn shouts.
Kolat fires again and Stoneking sings and screams at the same time as more enemy fire rocks her. He cracks his head again. Curi curses from the loader’s run. The massive detonation from the fired shell rattles Kolat’s bones and crashes his teeth together. He can’t help but shut his eyes, but when he opens them again and the glare has stopped printing on them he can see it. Kolat puts his hand up against the tank’s frame, proud and hurting, just as his machine is.
‘It’s broken,’ he shouts, hoarse.
‘Move up!’ Hale shouts. ‘Into the Sanctum!’
Raine keeps pace alongside the Antari of Grey Company as the Fyregiants push their way through the rubble they’ve made. Enemy fire has all but ceased in the face of the armoured detachment’s fury. Raine’s ears ring from the sound of it and when she blinks, the fireburst prints on her eyes. Pride burns in her chest.
Beside her, Yulia Crys laughs loud. ‘Now that’s a sight,’ she shouts.
The smoke and the ashes clear to expose the great dark wounds opened in the face of the spire by the Demolisher shells. They are ragged and toothed by snapped supports. As the Fyregiants grind through, they don’t look like giants at all. The scale of the Sanctum and of the wounds they have given it make them look like toys. The darkness swallows the tanks whole. As Raine charges after them through the rubble and thick, choking dust, she feels it do the same to her. The darkness is absolute. Heavy. Ahe
ad of her, the Fyregiants make a wall of armour, their engines echoing balefully. The high-powered stablights mounted on their hulls fade to nothing before they find the Sanctum’s opposite wall.
Around Raine, the Antari of Grey Company fan out to secure the entryway. The way the dust clings to their uniforms and their skin, they truly are grey. Shadows in the shadows. The depleted first company of the Kavrone Dragoons take up their positions too. Raine sees the way they move, disciplined and ordered, and she hears Lucia’s words as clearly as if she were standing beside her.
It is an honour to serve with them.
‘Raine!’
The shout comes from Vander. In his clipped accent, her name is made of edges. The Kavrone’s commissar is made of edges too, his face locked in a scowl.
‘Capture,’ he says. ‘Excise. Preserve. Those were our orders.’
Raine looks around at the Antari in position. ‘This is a capture,’ she says, calmly.
‘And preservation?’ Vander snaps. ‘What of that?’
‘The Antari know exactly how to break an opening,’ Raine says. ‘The Sanctum can more than withstand the damage.’
Vander stares at her.
‘If you are proven wrong, then you will answer to Sylar as well as Keene,’ Vander says.
Raine holds his gaze. ‘I am right,’ she says, and she means it in an altogether different way.
‘Commissar.’
Raine turns to see Hale standing there. Grey Company’s captain is plastered with masonry dust.
‘The perimeter is established,’ Hale says. ‘But there is something you need to see. Both of you.’
Raine nods. She follows Hale to the most forward point of their beachhead with Vander at her side. The Demolisher tank Stoneking waits there, growling into the dark. Beside it stands Lydia Zane. Picked out in the diffuse glow from the tank’s stablight, she looks like an apparition.
‘The Sanctum of Bones,’ Zane says, in her kindling-dry voice. ‘That is the name, is it not?’
‘It is,’ Raine says to her.
‘It seems they made a truth of it,’ Zane says, absently, pointing out into the darkness.
Raine cannot see the things that Zane can. Most of the time, she is grateful for that. In this moment, all it does is run chills through her bones.
‘Show me,’ Raine says.
Hale takes a flare launcher from his belt and fires it, up and high into the Sanctum. The flare bursts red and falls, throwing enough light to see the heavy ironwork arches and support pillars that bear the weight of the Sanctum above. The hanging devotionals and loops of broken cable. The statues of the Emperor in His guise as healer, hands outstretched.
And to see the bodies. Hundreds of bodies. Twisted, contorted and so very still.
‘The Sanctum of Bones,’ Zane says again, as a whisper.
Raine’s eyes aren’t printed with the glare of the Fyregiants’ work anymore, or the red glow of the flare in the darkness. When she blinks now, it’s those bodies that she sees.
‘Our orders are clear,’ she says to Hale. ‘Our obligation to the dead too.’
‘Excise?’ Hale says.
Raine narrows her eyes.
‘Excise,’ she says.
Eleven
Those who are lost
Cassia Tyl breaks the neck of the Sighted scout with a swift, quiet movement and catches him as he slumps against her, dead weight. The sawn-off shotgun the scout carries swings loose by the strap. Beside her Jeth does the same with the other Sighted unlucky enough to be patrolling the corridor.
Emergency lighting paints everything red as Tyl and Jeth drag the bodies out of the hallway and into an adjoining chamber they have already cleared. The level was once part of the augmetics facility. Chromed surfaces reflect the red light back at Tyl and there are runnels cut into the tiled floor to collect spilled blood and drain it away. There’s a good deal of it blackening the central drain. Bare, wicked instruments are arranged on trays.
Something about it prickles at Tyl’s memories. Something just beyond recall, long buried. She reaches out and touches one of the cutting knives and it spins on the tray, flashing in the light.
‘Ready?’
Jeth’s voice makes her flinch. She turns fast.
‘Whoa,’ he says.
Tyl shakes her head. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s this place.’
He nods. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘There’s a wickedness here.’
Tyl feels a wry smile cross her face at that.
‘We wouldn’t be here otherwise,’ she says.
Jeth laughs at that. Myre doesn’t. She never laughs.
Tyl rounds back out into the hallway with them following her as shadows. In the red light, the Duskhounds could for all the world be inside a dead, desiccated thing. The Sanctum’s arches are like black iron bones. The cracked plaster like skin.
The Sighted are like vermin, chewing their way into the carcass.
Tyl moves up to the next corner and stops, before holding up her hand for the others to do the same. The temperature gauge in her helmet’s display has dropped sharply, just like outside the spire. Like a winter wind. Frost slicks the floor and walls. Tyl picks up noise. Footsteps. Low voices with Laxian accents.
Four targets.
Tyl listens a second longer.
No. Five.
‘Rend and blind,’ she says. ‘Left. Fifty metres.’
Myre and Jeth send bursts of vox back as acknowledgement, then the three of them round the corner.
Five Sighted stand between the Duskhounds and the edge of the shield they have been tasked with dropping. Tyl sees it behind them, catching the light like smeared glass. The Sighted are dressed in heavy boots and helmets. Padded, layered fatigues and flak armour plates hung with feathers and bits of broken glass on dirty cord. None of it does them much good against hellguns on full charge. Two of the scouts go down, punched through with smoking holes before they can react. The other Sighted aren’t quite so slow. Two raise their autorifles and begin to fire as the flash charge that Myre slid along the floor goes off and blinds them. Shots go wild around Tyl as she keeps moving, unflinching. Her visor dips to compensate for the flare of light, which is how she catches the third of the Sighted fleeing towards the shield. He’s the alarm.
‘We’ve got a runner,’ she says, over the internal vox.
Her hellgun whispers and puts one of the shooters on his back. Jeth takes two hard rounds against his carapace plate in order to put the other against the wall. He hits the Sighted so hard that the scout goes limp and leaves a streak of blood down the tiles as he collapses into a heap. Myre drops the runner with a whisper from her own rifle when he’s just metres from the shield’s edge, sending him sprawling across the floor. Tyl can hear him breathing still. Cursing too. She steps over the other dead. The scout is trying to drag himself for the shield, but his legs won’t obey him because of the hole through him and the blood running into the gaps between the floor tiles. Tyl fires another las-bolt and the scout stops scrabbling with a long, ragged gasp and goes still.
This close to the shield, it’s even colder. Tyl realises that flakes of snow are dizzying around her. Where they hit her armour, they melt and bead. Where they hit the shield, they evaporate with a snap of blue light. The cold is strange, but not as strange as the feeling she gets standing near it. Like looking at those knives again. Unsettling. It makes her want to turn and run and she can taste grave dirt, despite her breather’s filters, which tells her exactly what kind of shield it is.
‘This is witch-work,’ she says. ‘A psychic shield.’
‘Well, shit,’ Jeth says.
‘There has to be a way through,’ Myre says. ‘Unless they trapped their scouts on the outside.’
Tyl frowns, and it’s not just because of the shield, it’s because of what she can hear coming from
beyond it.
‘What is that?’ Jeth asks.
Tyl can tell from the way he says it that he knows as well as she does what it is. From the way his heart rate spikes in her helmet view.
‘Singing,’ she says, absently. ‘That’s Soul of Antar.’
Raine steps over and around the dead as she leads the Antari deeper into the Sanctum of Bones. Mist scuds, knee-high, moving like a tide. Like one hundred thousand exhalations of breath. Above Raine, the ceiling seems impossibly high, lost to darkness and distance. Even with all that space, Raine still feels the pressure of the Sanctum all around her. The weight of it, like water waiting behind a dam as the stone of it begins to crack.
‘We have put them to the chase,’ Vander says. ‘They know the fury they face, and they hide from it. Cowards.’
He doesn’t sound disdainful this time. He sounds disgusted. Vander has his longrifle drawn and braced. The gold decoration on the barrel of it glitters where it catches in stablight beams. His eyes glitter too, like green gemstones.
‘I don’t think this is hiding,’ Raine says. ‘I think it is waiting.’
Vander scowls. ‘Whatever it is, they should know better. Their deaths are assured. They will answer for their sins.’
The smell of death carries to Raine on the air. Overhead the Sanctum creaks, tectonic.
‘As all sinners will,’ she says to Lukas Vander.
For an instant, Vander’s scowl disappears, replaced with a fleeting uncertainty, but it is just an instant, and then it is gone and his control reasserts itself. He turns away from her, to what is left of his company.
‘Vengeance does not wait,’ he calls out. ‘Pick up the pace!’
Then Vander stalks away through the mist. Raine follows him, keeping her pistol raised and her finger close to the trigger. As she pushes through the mist it parts and shifts enough for her to see the bodies. The bloodied vacancies where their eyes should be and the marks made in their skin.
The rictus grins on their faces.
‘This is bad,’ Yuri Hale says, beside her. ‘All of this death. All of this quiet.’
‘They’ve made a curse of it,’ Makar Kayd says. The vox-operator is twitchy, sweeping his lasrifle back and forth. ‘Trapped the souls of the dead where He can’t find them.’
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 22